Bret Stephens Quotes

The debate over the inherent benefits of Pax Americana should have been settled long ago. But history only settles great debates for as long as people can remember the history.

This is how we arrive at a broken-windows world: Rules are invoked but not enforced. Principles are idealized but not defended. International law is treated not as a complement to traditional geopolitical leadership but as the superior alternative to it.

A balance of power may seem plausible in theory. But the nature of power is that it seeks preeminence, not balance.

Maybe there’s an explanation for why Americans seem congenitally disposed to ask “Why not?” rather than “Why?

No great power can treat foreign policy as a spectator sport and hope to remain a great power.

Populism is not conservatism, which by definition entails resistance to public whims. Conservatives who seek to use populism for their own ends inevitably make a Faustian bargain. We are now living with the consequences of that bargain in the form of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Debts and deficits do matter. But they’re not the only things that matter. And they matter to different countries in different ways at different times. The United States emerged from the Second World War with a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 100 percent. Yet winning the war was an excellent investment of national resources.

Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for shallow things, shallowly. Europeans believe in human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, progress, the environment, pleasure. These beliefs are all very nice, but they are also secondary. What Europeans no longer believe in are the things from which their beliefs spring: Judaism and Christianity; liberalism and the Enlightenment; martial pride and capability; capitalism and wealth. Still less do they believe in fighting or sacrificing or paying or even arguing for these things. Having ignored and undermined their own foundations, they wonder why their house is coming apart.

Conservative foreign policy is in the business of shaping habits of behavior, not winning hearts and minds. It announces red lines sparingly but enforces them unsparingly. It is willing to act decisively, or preventively, to punish or prevent blatant transgressions of order—not as a matter of justice but in the interests of deterrence. But it knows it cannot possibly punish or prevent every transgression. It champions its values consistently and confidently, but it doesn’t conflate its values and its interests. It wants to let citizens go about their business as freely and easily as possible. But it knows that security is a prerequisite for civil liberty, not a threat to it. Where it can use a finger, or a hand, to tilt the political scales of society toward liberal democracy, it will do so. But it won’t attempt to tilt the scales in places where the tilting demands all of its weight and strength and endurance. It does not waste its energy or time chasing diplomatic symbols: its ambitions do not revolve around a Nobel Peace Prize. It prefers liberal autocracy to illiberal democracy, because the former is likelier to evolve into democracy than the latter is to evolve into liberalism. It knows the value of hope, and knows also that economic growth based on enterprise and the freest possible movement of goods, services, capital, and labor is the best way of achieving it. And it is mindful of the claims of conscience, which is strengthened by faith.

Trump’s Syria policy: an impulse wrapped in indifference inside an incoherence.

Five of the ten richest people in the country, and a third of the richest fifty, hold official government positions.

This is machtpolitik in reverse, in which [great power] is begging small favors from weaker powers on temporary matters in exchange for broad concessions with far-reaching ramifications.

Europe cannot be Europe if it is not true to its core inheritance. This is the marriage of reason and revelation that produced a civilization of technological mastery tempered by human decency.

To say that Europe is a civilization apart is not to say it is better or worse. It is merely to say: This is us and that is you. Nor is it to say that Europe ought to be a closed civilization. It merely needs to be one that doesn’t dissolve on contact with the strangers it takes into its midst.

Today’s liberal foreign policy, to adapt Churchill, is appeasement wrapped in realism inside moral equivalency.

The notion of moral hazard, fundamental to economics, has a foreign-policy dimension, too. Any country that believes it will never be made to pay the price for the risks it takes will take ever-greater risks. It’s bad enough when the country in question is Greece. This is Iran.

Could Europe’s liberal political traditions, its religious and cultural heritage, long survive a massive influx of Muslim immigrants, in the order of tens of millions of people? No. Not given Europe’s frequently unhappy experience with much of its Muslim population. Not when you have immigrant groups that resist assimilation and host countries that make only tentative civic demands.

Christopher committed the disastrous error of taking the Europeans at their word and letting them try to sort out an international crisis on their own. Clinton compounded the mistake by persuading himself that the rivalries and hatreds of the region were simply too ancient, too deep-seated, to do much about. And so the siege of Sarajevo continued. And so the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica happened. And so UN peacekeepers were held hostage and European diplomats were humiliated and American foreign policy was paralyzed and hundreds of thousands of people were killed or put into concentration camps or sent into exile by a minor Serbian potentate and his rat-faced lieutenants.

A decade later, Lee’s views hadn’t simply become mainstream. They had become conservative mainstream. Republicans are busy writing their own retreat doctrine in the name of small government, civil liberties, fiscal restraint, “realism,” a creeping sense of Obama-induced national decline, and a deep pessimism about America’s ability to make itself, much less the rest of the world, better.

In the real world, social democracy produces chronically low rates of growth, and persistently high levels of unemployment. But it also commands profound ideological and political identification. And, once entrenched, it is politically nearly impossible to abandon.

We pretend to “pivot” to Asia, but so far the pivot has mostly been a feint. We are quietly backing away from our security guarantees to Taiwan.

Rather, the narrative the Powers-That-Be in these various institutions sell to those they’re charged with informing, educating, enlightening and entertaining must always serve the purposes of The Supremacy. New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens tip-toed (for obvious reasons) around this fact in a piece now seemingly expunged from the Internet: A historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades – the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining US crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany – would find most contemporary journalism useless.

When nothing is expected, much is forgiven, and when much is expected, nothing is forgiven