American foreign policy

“Christ, Edward! No!” Edward Luttwak has just lunged at me with a knife in the study of the house he shares with his wife in a suburb of obdurate anonymity near Washington, DC. He is giving an unsolicited demonstration of how to most effectively stab someone. “Let your hand go limp, then feint a punch with your non-knife hand,” he says with gusto, his left fist fluttering around my face, “then stab into the diaphragm upwards. The air will go out of them like a balloon and they’ll drop to the floor. They may live another twenty years, but they’ll certainly be out of action for the next twenty minutes.” The demonstration has come after a brief typology of knives for my benefit — also unsolicited.

Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement that he was not bluffing about using nuclear weapons against the West in his war on Ukraine is one of the strongest indications yet of the risks the liberal world now faces in opposing authoritarian aggression. In the face of Russian aggression, or in committing the United States to defending Taiwan, as President Joe Biden did yet again recently, Washington and its partners face the possibility of direct confrontation with the world’s most powerful, nuclear-armed militaries. For the first time in a generation, Western powers risk being checked by adversaries willing to threaten massive conventional and nuclear warfare. The era of cost-free intervention to uphold the liberal world order is over.

Traditionally, the GOP has been the favorite of those concerned with safety and national security. The party of Ronald Reagan emphasized the need for strong engagement abroad, a willingness to project power when necessary, and a commitment to the free world. Yet the contours of the conservative movement have begun to change in recent years, calling into question the GOP’s credibility on the issue of security. The growing support for a sort of soft isolationism is a problem. It is also fundamentally not conservative. Prominent voices from the American right have been carrying the banner of soft isolationism for years, from Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance to Senator Josh Hawley and former president Donald Trump.

There is an open tug-of-war going on right now over the direction of foreign policy on the right. The attempts by various factions and individuals to seize and define the principles of an “America First” foreign policy has led to politicians and institutions using similar language and labels to defend very different positions. Yet the overarching direction of foreign policy on the right seems clearer in the results than in the conversations. Even as there are disagreements among Republicans in Washington — on Ukraine funding, for instance — they seem to have much more in common when it comes time to actually take a vote or make a decision.

Imagine a neighbor who is constantly in everyone’s business. Perhaps you have such a person, or persons, in your own community. The neighbor complains about the paint colors of shutters, the height of lawn grass, and the number of cars parked on the street. You better hope he doesn’t find out about your backyard chicken coop if it's prohibited in your county. It’s bad enough to have neighbors like this, constantly on the alert, monitoring everyone’s behavior, and complaining to everyone in earshot. But imagine if an entire country was like this. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. For that is America — at least the foreign policy establishment and the powerful elite institutions like corporate media and the academy that influence it.

Liberal internationalists, neoconservatives and NeverTrumpers are having the time of their lives these days, ridiculing anyone on the political right who has ever said a good thing about Vladimir Putin. Those “Putin groupies” as a Wall Street Journal columnist described them, include former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and, of course, Trump himself. Trump described Putin as a “genius” and said he was a better president than Barack Obama — and he isn’t the only American president to compliment the Russian leader. President George W. Bush said about Putin, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.

The Russian Defense Ministry held a briefing last week claiming that they have discovered US-led biological laboratories in Ukraine. Moscow stated that a rapid halt was brought to the facilities’ activities, adding that Kyiv and Washington had violated the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons. The Kremlin did not feel the need to provide evidence of its claims, par for the course in Putin’s Russia.