Section: The American Conservative (USA)
The Fake News Fake Story
“Fake stories” are in the news. The narrative goes something like this: fabricated accounts that misrepresent “the truth” are proliferating on the internet, and once they appear on a social networking site, they are frequently spread far and wide, often doing serious damage along the way to whatever or whomever was the target of the initial...
Foreign Policy in America’s Interest: Realism, Nationalism, and the Next President
Foreign Policy in America’s Interest: Realism, Nationalism, and the Next President November 15, 2016 | 8:00am to 1:30pm | George Washington University | Washington, DC Election 2016 has raised big questions about America’s role in the world. Donald Trump promises to pursue an unapologetic nationalism, yet he may be selective about...
Obama’s World: Utopian Myth?
Speaking in Greece on his valedictory trip to Europe as president, Barack Obama struck a familiar theme: “we are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude form of nationalism, or ethnic identity, or tribalism that is built around an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ … “[T]he future of humanity and the future of the world is going to be defined...
Repairing the U.S.-Russia Relationship
I was part of the second panel at TAC‘s foreign policy conference yesterday on U.S.-Russian relations. Here are the remarks I gave: U.S.-Russian relations are worse than they have been at any point since the end of the Cold War, and both governments have defined their interests in Syria and Ukraine in such a way that it is difficult to see how...
The Trump Doctrine
However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border. Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists of the Acela Corridor. Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy rooted in the national...
Clinton’s Foreign Policy Will Obviously Be More Aggressive, So Why Pretend Otherwise?
James Traub gamely tries to convince us (and himself) that Clinton’s foreign policy won’t be as aggressive and meddlesome as she says it will be, but he undermines his argument when he says this: As a senator and later secretary of state, she rarely departed from the counsel of senior military officials. She was far more persuaded of...
The American Conservative Presidential Symposium
A good magazine presents a robust discussion of the national life, and The American Conservative has aimed since the beginning to show that conservatism cannot be reduced to a checklist or mere partisan formula. To that end, we have always encouraged a wide-ranging examination of the choices our political system offers—and fails to offer. This...
The Last Gasp of Bush-Era Republicanism
Jim Antle sees Evan McMullin as the candidate for Republicans who thought there was nothing seriously wrong with the pre-Trump GOP: But McMullin’s following seems to be disproportionately made up of conservatives who thought everything was fine until Trump showed up like an uninvited dinner guest who lacked the Bush-era GOP’s table...
Time to Break Up With the Philippines
Alliances are transmission belts of war. So our Founding Fathers taught and the 20th century proved. When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany in 1914, America sat out, until our own ships were being sunk in 1917. When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany, September 3, 1939, we stayed out until Hitler declared war on...
McMullin’s Dreadfully Conventional Hawkishness
I haven’t taken Evan McMullin’s independent bid for president seriously because it began so late in the year with a complete unknown for a candidate, and I still don’t think it will amount to much. However, because there is a nontrivial chance that he could win some electoral votes by carrying Utah, and because some readers have...
