Make America Victorious Again
At the 2016 elections our bipartisan foreign policy class is near-unanimous, not so much behind Hillary Clinton nor even against Donald Trump. Rather, it circles its wagons around its own identities, ideas, practices, and, yes, livelihoods. Clinton represents the ruling class’s people and priorities in foreign affairs as in domestic ones, though she seems to care even less about the former’s substance. Trump, a stranger to most of the foreign policy class (though not to its current epitome, Henry Kissinger) has voiced views on foreign affairs that are within the establishment’s variances in substance if not in tone...
Nevertheless, the foreign policy class does not merely reject Trump; it detests him. Why? Because Trump, in tone even more than substance, expresses the subversive thought that U.S. foreign policy has failed to “put America first,” causing the nation to suffer defeat after defeat. Hence, the entire foreign policy class—in the bureaucracies, think tanks, academe, and the media—are a bunch of losers. Millions of Americans consider these two thoughts to be common sense. But the above-mentioned class takes the first as the root of heresies, and the second as a demagogic insult. Consequently, the 2016 election is not so much about any particular plank in any foreign policy platform. It is about who defines and what constitutes common sense...
Our Progressive foreign policy class has continued to prosper because its unanimity about fundamental assumptions has throttled critiques from within and scorned any from outside. The prevailing view that the foreign policy class consists of three competing intellectual currents—Liberal Internationalists, Realists, and Neoconservatives—neglects the fact that all proceed from Progressivism’s assumptions that all nations want for themselves what each of these American factions wants for them. As a result, the differences end up having little practical meaning. Liberal Internationalists, regarding themselves as harbingers of secular, technocratic progress, see foreigners as interested in the same things, thereby willing to modify their behavior to attain America’s help. Realists, seeing themselves as dispassionate technicians of power for the sake of international order, think foreigners are similarly amenable to the steps needed to achieve peaceful international equilibria. Neoconservatives, believing that foreigners are eager for democracy’s blessings, are eager to help foreigners to attain them.
In sum, today’s foreign policy class, no less than its forbears of a century ago, see themselves as mankind’s seniors, teachers, and benefactors. They expect to be treated as such. But as they have dealt with the world, they have sown disrespect for themselves and for our America...
The 2016 election is about whether that pattern should change. How much, if at all, it would change under Trump matters much less than the mere possibility it might change. Trump’s virtue in foreign policy lies in having voiced this simple, vital thought: U.S. foreign policy must put America first, and deliver victories rather than defeats. Whether Trump really believes that, whether he would act on it, or even whether he understands past mistakes, is secondary.
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Video: The Revolution of America's Regime. Angelo M. Codevilla, The Claremont Institute, discusses the revolution of America's Regime and how the Democrat Obama administration differs from previous administrations. Presentation at the 2016 Social Contract Writers' Workshop.