At The Free Press, we are proud to publish writers and thinkers who don’t all see the world the same way. That’s by design. And our subscribers are no different. That’s why we publish Letters to the Editor: to hear what you, our curious, engaged readers, have to say about the words in our pages—whether you’re nodding along in approval or shaking your head in dismay.
Here are this month’s highlights.
Our first letter is a response to Yoram Hazony’s essay that answered the question: Is Trump a neocon or an isolationist? Hazony argued that the president is a nationalist whose foreign policy comes down to protecting America’s interests and keeping only those allies who can become capable of defending themselves.
Yehudah Mirsky, a Brandeis University professor and former State Department human rights official, based in Jerusalem, writes in his letter that nationalism isn’t all that we need, partly because much of its moral legitimacy and strength comes from legal institutions, civic structures, and moral norms that are under attack by the Trump administration itself.
Like Yoram Hazony, I am critical of today’s liberal failures and of the regularly depraved enterprise that regularly masquerades as human rights. I also welcomed American support for Israel’s war against Iran, even though I detest Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yes, there is a method to President Donald Trump, and he must be taken much more seriously as a historical figure for what he advances and represents. (If, for Hegel, Napoleon was “the world-soul on horseback,” then Trump is the world-soul on a golden escalator.) And yes, simple dichotomies of liberal internationalist versus isolationist don’t do justice to the recent past—or to our policy choices today. But Hazony’s presentation doesn’t do justice to them either.
Hazony forgets that the “U.S.-led liberal empire” that supposedly “delivered neither peace nor stability” actually won the Cold War. U.S. efforts at fostering state-building and rule of law emerged for the simple reason that if we didn’t help decolonizing nations build institutions, the Soviets would.
Iraq and Afghanistan ended in failure, not least because had democratization and rule of law been the point of invading, then we wouldn’t have frozen out all the professionals who spent their professional lives working on this.
