In a December column in the Washington Post, reformed conservative Max Boot bemoaned the emergence of competing visions for American foreign policy, led by Trumpian skeptics on the right and progressive leaders, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, on the left. These visions, Boot said, were in opposition to his own beloved doctrine of primacy and an American-led international order.
“For decades, elites in the United States had a consensus on foreign policy: They believed that championing a liberal world order was in our interest,” he writes. But now “we are seeing a new left-right axis emerge around protectionism and isolationism—the very policies whose failure during the 1930s ultimately led to the internationalist consensus of the postwar period.”
The allusion to the 1930s is a common refrain for neoconservatives, and also not easy to counter. After all, no one argues that Hitler's rise, igniting the worst conflict in all of human history, was a good thing. In 2015, New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait catalogued the more than 60 times that former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol had publicly referenced Hitler and Churchill since the late 1990s.
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