While serious foreign policy debate, like any kind of serious policy debate, has been virtually absent in this election, not talking about problems doesn’t make them go away. In fact, the world has gotten much more dangerous under President Obama, and dealing with it will be a key challenge of the next administration. Two of our recent cover stories provide some useful guidance, I think Tom Donnelly’s thought-provoking “Reversing Decline: The Example of Elizabethan England,” and Jeff Bergner’s clear and comprehensive “What Good Is Military Force? We have forgotten how useful it can be.” Any policymaker in the executive branch, any member of Congress—any concerned citizen—will benefit from reading both.
And Americans of all stripes will also benefit from the latest release from the Foundation for Constitutional Government, a new conversation with former assistant secretary of state and deputy national security advisor Elliott Abrams. For people interested in how to think about the challenges we confront, and how a serious administration would go about confronting them, this is, if I may say so, pure gold. Abrams, a frequent contributor to TWS, explains the difficulties a new president will face in quickly putting together a foreign policy team and strategy, discusses concretely some of the urgent challenges the new president will encounter in restoring America’s global standing, and offers advice about how the new president should work within and around Washington’s entrenched bureaucracies. This is a conversation that is must-viewing for both practitioners and students of foreign policy.
By the way, several of you wrote saying how much you enjoyed the latest conversation with Harvey Mansfield. Let me therefore recommend two short essays that you might not have seen: Mansfield’s short and bracing answer to a question posed by Harvard magazine to several Harvard professors about how one should judge the Obama administration (spoiler alert: not highly); and a short and trenchant essay for the American Enterprise Institute on “Aristotle on Economics and the Flourishing Life“. Both, needless to say, are well worth a read.
And next Monday the FCG will be releasing a conversation with Justice Clarence Thomas that we filmed a few weeks ago. It’s a good one! And, despite this election year and its implications for the Court, a somewhat hopeful one.
