I do not see much evidence of the battle over the direction of U. S. foreign policy that Emma Ashford and Trevor Thrall write about in their piece at War on the Rocks:
Curious to understand where the right and left are heading on foreign policy, we’ve held a variety of events at the Cato Institute to try and understand this question: a roundtable building on Patrick Porter’s work on the “liberal international order,†events with notable critics of the existing foreign policy consensus, such as Harvard’s Stephen Walt, meetings to explore potential areas of common ground between libertarians and progressives, and interviews with experts for Power Problems, our biweekly podcast.
The results highlight not only the internal debate inside the Republican Party, but also the growing demand inside the Democratic Party for a coherent alternative both to Trump and to the existing foreign policy consensus that he helped discredit. We also found evidence of an unexpected and potentially significant turn in U.S. foreign policy: a new bipartisan consensus on the need to confront and contain China.
What I do see is a gap between what those in charge of the federal government and both political parties want and what most Americans want. What I see is an elite consensus in favor of intervention, sometimes for security reasons, sometimes for humanitarian ones, while ordinary people are willing to go to war to defend the U. S. when we are attacked but not for other reasons.
For example, I have yet to encounter any ordinary person who’s greatly exercised about America’s abdicating its leadership role in world affairs such as it is. But there are endless editorials, articles, and opinion pieces about that in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets for elite opinion.
Other than, possibly, a few Ukrainian-Americans, is anyone outside of elite circles very much concerned about the war between Russia and the Ukraine? I’m more concerned that the present Ukrainian government will push us into a war with Russia than I am about Russia wanting to avoid having a hostile periphery. Maybe it’s because I’ve observed that cornered rats will strike.
