How Not to Fix the Liberal World Order
We are all still trying to figure out what the Trump administration’s foreign policy will be, which is why Michael Anton’s “America and the Liberal International Order,” in the inaugural issue of American Affairs, merits some degree of attention. Anton doesn’t have a lot of original or insightful things to say in this piece (about which more below), but since he is now deputy assistant for strategic communications at the National Security Council, one might read his essay in the hope of decoding the administration’s underlying beliefs and anticipating its future course.One thing is clear: Anton has mastered the template for conservative jeremiads about U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy. First, employ an authoritative but conversational style that suggests these issues are really pretty simple and only a fool or a knave would fail to understand them. Second, keep the analysis at 40,000 feet, avoid nitty-gritty policy details, and employ appealing alliterative concepts, such as Anton’s trinity of “prestige, prosperity, and peace.” Third, leaven the essay with selective historical examples and put in some well-chosen references to classical Greeks, Romans or other long-dead political philosophers to give the piece a shiny intellectual veneer. Lastly, treat your targets with a degree of contempt and suggest they are unpatriotic, incompetent, naive, intellectually lazy, or all of the above.
Anton’s main goal is to defend the president who subsequently appointed him and his main target is the coalition of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives who questioned Trump’s fitness for office during the 2016 campaign and have continued to criticize him since November. He sees them as part of an inbred foreign policy “priesthood” or “guild” that is defending a liberal international order it can no longer define, explain, or justify. Our entire approach to foreign policy needs to be rethought, in short, and Donald J. Trump is the man to do it.
You might think I’d greet this article with loud cheers, given my own misgivings about America’s foreign-policy establishment and my belief that U.S. grand strategy needs to be revised. That is not the case, alas, because with one important exception,
Anton’s fusillade misses its target. Even worse, there’s little evidence he (or Trump) has any idea how to improve the situation.https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/06/how-not-to-fix-the-liberal-world-order/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editors+picks&utm_term=%2AEditors+Picks
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