The Briefing Room—March 3, 2025
The founders vs. the neocons; and the relationship between popes, statesmen & American renewal: it’s this week’s Briefing Room.
THE EVENTS OF THIS PAST WEEK reflect a fundamental shift in the American approach to foreign policy. The shift of treating foreign nations as places with interests, histories, and mixed motivations has been denounced by many—at home and abroad—as a betrayal of America’s deepest values and long tradition of defending liberal democracy, and combatting evil (i.e., nations not constituted by liberal democracy) around the world.
Such people—many of whom often claim to possess a deep knowledge of the American tradition and (like Bill Kristol, below) proclaim fealty to the values of the Founding Fathers—are calling for a continuation of what has been in fact a very brief and anomalous period of American history:
That anomalous period began with the conclusion of the World War II, when a devastated Europe and a threatening Soviet Union required that the United States exercise its military and economic power as a countervailing force in the midst of a power vacuum. . . .