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The latest addition to PBS's American Masters series — "The Incomparable William F. Buckley, Jr." — makes for engrossing viewing, which isn't surprising since Buckley himself was compulsively watchable (and readable).The story of Buckley's life and career has been well and often told, not least by the protagonist himself. A much anticipated biography two decades in the making by Sam Tanenhaus is expected early next year. A globe-trotting journalist, editor, author, television personality, friend of Ronald and Nancy Reagan (among many others), and founder of the conservative magazine National Review, Buckley was, in the estimation of the late Dartmouth professor and longtime National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart, "the most important journalist since Walter Lippmann." "In fact," continued Hart, "Buckley's career was more impressive."Maybe so — after all, what started in 1955 as a niche magazine with 16,000 subscribers, transformed over the ensuing decades into a big business, which came to be known colloquially as Conservative Inc., replete with multi-million dollar think tanks, obscenely well compensated radio and TV personalities, and presidential candidates seeking its imprimatur. There is of course no question that Lippmann and Buckley's respective audiences were immense. But the comparison to Lippmann has its limits. Of the two, Lippmann had an embarrassingly better track record on U.S. foreign policy, for example, particularly when it came to the Vietnam War and the Cold War.National Review's coverage of the Cold War was colored, and not for the better, by a roster of ex-Communists and intellectuals with ties and sympathies that extended beyond the Iron Curtain, to what became known as the Captive Nations. The philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the postwar brand of anti-Communism "was originally the brainchild of former Communists who needed a new ideology by which to explain and reliably foretell the course of history."One of the things the documentary does well is demonstrate why the Vietnam War was the principal reason the now-infamous televised "debate" between Buckley and the novelist and critic Gore Vidal turned so ugly so quickly. After all, as the documentary notes, "Buckley was absolutely convinced that Vietnam was a crucial battle in the Cold War against Communism."And within Conservative Inc., no myth has been as unassailable as the idea that the Cold War was not only "won" by the United States but that it was "won" by Buckley's hearty band of conservatives. The columnist (and former Washington editor of NR) George Will summed up the prevailing view this way:"…Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan. Without Reagan, no victory in the Cold War. Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War."But Will's reasoning suffers, as Buckley himself might have put it, from the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.The triumphant reaction by NR to the end of the Cold War was noted with distaste by the great Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs in a letter to the man generally recognized as the "father" of containment, George F. Kennan, in September 1991,"Buckley gloats in the last number of his magazine: 'We won!" "We won!' He repeats that all over again, etc. etc."The idea that "We won, we won," was no doubt sincerely believed by Buckley and his followers, but it is, alas, an idea that is both ahistorical and dangerous — as we have come to see in the more than three decades since the end of the Cold War.***Once the Cold War ended, Buckley and his movement might have done well to reconsider the utility of continuing their alliance with the neoconservatives — after all, the rationale for so doing pretty much evaporated with the Soviet menace. By 1992, it was clear that a conservative alternative to the Cold War policy of global hegemony was emerging thanks to the insurgent candidacy of Patrick Buchanan. From the vantage point of 2024, it seems clear that for many conservatives, Buchanan's was the path not taken — tragically so. Instead of tending to our own garden after 1989, Washington, with the enthusiastic support of Conservative Inc., embarked on a frenetic campaign of ruinous overseas misadventures from which we have yet to disengage. For the conservative movement, the first post-Cold War decade saw fusionists continue their stranglehold on domestic policy, while the neocons grabbed the initiative on foreign policy. All the while, Buchanan became a prophet without honor in his own country.The American Conservative magazine co-founder Scott McConnell noted in a talk given in 2014 that as the Cold War was reaching its denouement, Buckley decided, thanks to the influence of the neocon power couple Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, "To allow neoconservatives to regulate the terms of Mideast discussion in his own magazine, National Review." The consequences for the magazine and the movement were profound. Thereafter, noted McConnell, "…The neoconservatives essentially won the right to supervise Israel-related discussions in National Review…Thereafter, any young Conservative knew the rules - you'd best be sufficiently pro-Israel to satisfy Midge and Norman if you wanted to advance."PBS ignores this history, making it seem as though the most interesting thing about Buckley in his final decade was his admission, made on the Charlie Rose Show, that he wanted to die. Whatever the (questionable) novelty of such sentiments by someone who had a) just lost his wife of 57 years and b) an advanced case of emphysema, Buckley's politics toward the end of his life became far more interesting than one might come to understand if they relied solely on PBS.Writing shortly after his death in 2008, Buckley biographer John Judis observed that, "Buckley chided conservatives or neoconservatives who refused to recognize that circumstances had changed — who invoked the old bogeymen or invented new ones." After visiting Cuba in 1998, Buckley even praised that great hero of foreign policy restrainers, John Quincy Adams, who, according to Buckley, "[r]eminded us that though we are friends of liberty everywhere, we are custodians only of our own."Indeed, thanks to the Iraq War and the mendacity of his old allies, the neocons who promoted it so ardently, the scales appeared to have fallen from Buckley's eyes. As Jeffrey Hart wrote in the American Conservative, "Buckley had expressed doubts about the Iraq War from the beginning ... During the last two years of his life, Bill Buckley understood the facts about Iraq and their implications." An exchange with with George Will on ABC in 2005 offered a sense of Buckley's thinking post-Iraq:Will: Today, we have a very different kind of foreign policy. It's called Wilsonian. And the premise of the Bush doctrine is that America must spread democracy, because our national security depends upon it. And America can spread democracy. It knows how. It can engage in national building. This is conservative or not?Buckley: It's not at all conservative. It's anything but conservative. It's not conservative at all, inasmuch as conservatism doesn't invite unnecessary challenges. It insists on coming to terms with the world as it is…The story of Buckley's tenacious engagement with the war and his break with the neocons is a fascinating one, though one that PBS either missed or left on the cutting room floor.As Tanenhaus recounted in The New Republic in 2007:"Buckley has faulted Bush for trying to go it alone in Iraq and chided neoconservatives who"simply overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence."….When I asked him recently if Iraq is the Republicans' Vietnam, he said, 'Absolutely.'"It is arguable that on matters of war and peace Buckley ended up holding positions closer to those held by his nemesis Gore Vidal than the Republican standard bearers in 2008 and 2012. Which is to say that by the end of his life, with regard to U.S. foreign policy, Buckley was getting it right.

April 4 marked the 75th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty by the foreign ministers of the original 12 members of the NATO alliance. And rather serendipitously, it was reported this week that NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has proposed standing up a new $100 billion fund to help Ukraine continue its effort against the Russian invasion — just in time for the anniversary.While only in the planning stages, the so-called Mission for Ukraine proposal would also see NATO take control of the Ramstein Group which the U.S. set up to coordinate military supplies to Ukraine (this particular aspect of the plan was immediately met with a cold shoulder by the White House yesterday). The alliance support for the proposal, which seeks to "Trump-proof" support for the Ukraine war in the event the former president is elected and seeks to pull the plug on U.S. funding for Ukraine, is split along lines one might expect, with support coming from the Baltics, Poland, and The Washington Post, and opposition from Hungary. Critics, such as the legendary American diplomat Chas Freeman say that the plan is simply "a case of throwing good money—in this case, borrowed money—after bad." Freeman sees this as a case of NATO clutching at straws, after all, as he tells Responsible Statecraft, "NATO has run out of Ukrainians to sacrifice on the battlefield as well as the armaments production needed to equip the existing, greatly depleted Ukrainian armed forces. A bond fund will neither create more Ukrainians nor produce more weapons to arm those who have so far survived."What both Europe and Ukraine really need, says Freeman, "is peace, and this demands negotiations with Russia. This is a shameless attempt to use financial capitalism to avoid that reality, while further enriching munitions manufacturers. NATO is not a hedge fund and should not attempt to behave like one.When alliances attempt to borrow money for lost causes, you would be right to judge that they know the jig is up."Stoltenberg has reportedly pitched the plan as a means "to shield the mechanism against the winds of political change." As such it is redolent of the way the European Commission functions when it seeks to supplant national law with supranational diktat. If voters in the U.S. or Canada or France or Germany seek to elect people (like Trump) who want to defund the war effort, the existence of such a fund essentially overrules them, i.e., "Trump-proofing."Chicago-based international affairs analyst Neil Bouhan sees this as an attempt to "insulate a fundamentally political body, NATO, from the politics of the body's most important member, the U.S. It hands over billions of dollars to NATO and seemingly discretionary control over the U.S. military."Indeed, the proposal raises a number of questions, such as: does it violate the NATO charter? The NATO treaty posits that "an armed attack against one…shall be considered an attack against them all." But Ukraine is not a NATO member and the treaty, in any case, merely calls for consultations in the event "the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened." Does it mean American military assets in Europe will be controlled by an unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels? After all, as an unnamed diplomat told the Financial Times yesterday "This will be crossing a Rubicon. Nato will have a role in coordinating lethal support to Ukraine."As of now the White House seems to be taking a 'wait and see' approach. But the Biden administration seems to have a fatal attraction to bad ideas, of which this is yet another in a rather depressingly long series.

If Secretary of State Antony Blinken's Wednesday address in Washington is any indication, any hopes that the thousands of freshly dug graves across Ukraine and Russia might be giving rise to introspection or regret that diplomatic overtures could have staved off the war, are bound to be dashed. In a speech titled, "The Power and Purpose of American Diplomacy in a New Era," Blinken set forth a vision of U.S. foreign policy that is both exhaustingly familiar and deeply concerning because it indicates, at the very least, that our chief diplomat has very little understanding of what traditional diplomacy actually means. The sense one takes away from the speech is that Blinken believes it to be analogous to edict, fiat, and ukase.Blinken's conception of diplomacy does accurately reflect one thing: the Biden administration's policy of waging a two-front cold war against the two principal authoritarian powers, China and Russia, as laid out in the 2022 National Security Strategy. Whether, by ratcheting up tensions with the two continental Eurasian powers, the policy has succeeded in making America and its allies in Europe and Asia safer, remains an open question.Blinken, addressing (probably some) future members of the American (and international) foreign policy policy elite at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, noted that the students today are facing a vastly transformed international landscape than when he launched his own career at the dawn of the post Cold War era in the early 1990s.The promise of that era has now passed. According to Blinken:…Decades of relative geopolitical stability have given way to an intensifying competition with authoritarian powers, revisionist powers…Beijing and Moscow are working together to make the world safe for autocracy through their "no limits partnership."Today, he went on, far from the sunlit uplands of the Clinton era, we inhabit a world where " democracies are under threat." And the threat is twofold. Externally there is of course Russia and China. But there is a second threat. And that one is closer to home, one that is emerging "from the inside by elected leaders who exploit resentments and stoke fears; erode independent judiciaries and the media; enrich cronies; crack down on civil society and political opposition." Reading Secretary Blinken's speech, it is hard to believe that there was a time, within Blinken's lifetime even, that Democrats like President John F. Kennedy counseled cooperation, even dialogue and empathy, when turning to deal with one's adversaries. It is indeed, given the party's transformation in recent years, difficult to contemplate there was once a president who asked us to temper our self-regard, cautioning that "no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue."But no more. Antony Blinken has seen the enemy and it is us (and the Russians and the Chinese, and probably the Hungarians and most definitely the North Koreans, and if they keep heading down the 'wrong' path, Poland might get thrown into the mix, but not yet, not with the war still on.) What to do? The answer is simplicity itself: Permanent vigilance in the service of the "international order." For when "the Beijings and Moscows of the world try to rewrite – or rip down – the pillars of the multilateral system; when they falsely claim that the order exists merely to advance the interests of the West at the expense of the rest – a growing global chorus of nations and people will say, and stand up to say: No, the system you are trying to change is our system; it serves our interests."Sentiments such as these aren't necessarily alarming if they're uttered (and they are) by the kind of students in the audience at SAIS today — after all, they're young and idealistic. What's frightening is that they were uttered without irony by the nation's chief diplomat — even if he is a product, as this one is, of both Harvard and Marty Peretz's New Republic. The bigger problem with Blinken's address, aside from it being both astoundingly naive and self-serving, is that is reveals a mindset unalterably opposed to the practice of actual diplomacy which in turn has led to a disdain both for negotiations and for the concepts of national interests, reciprocity and empathy — all of which had been used to keep the peace between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the first Cold War. Blithely ripping up that playbook in favor of a maximalist doctrine that seeks to confine into permanent obloquy states that view their own interests differently from those of Washington would seem a mistake. But it's a mistake diplomats from both parties seem intent on making.

The failure of successive U.S. administrations to distinguish between core and peripheral national security interests lies at the heart of much of the trouble that we now face.
Nowhere is this failure of discernment clearer than in the Biden administration's 2022 National Security Strategy, which laid out an ambitious two front Cold War strategy that seeks to simultaneously staunch China's rise in the East while countering Russian revanchism in the West. It defines the emerging world order as one in which "Democracies and autocracies are engaged in a contest to show which system of governance can best deliver for their people and the world."
Close observers of U.S. foreign policy over the past three years might be forgiven for wondering whether the administration has succeeded in achieving any of the particular goals it has set for itself. But in fairness to the Biden administration, such failures have become commonplace over the past 30 years.
The journalist and editor Lewis Lapham noted as far back as 2002 that, "The makers of America's foreign policy over the course of the previous fifty years have embraced a dream of power almost as vainglorious as the one that rallied the disciples of Osama bin Laden to the banner of jihad."
In the 20 years since Lapham wrote those words, the U.S. has stumbled into multiple foreign policy disasters, including but not limited to the needless and counterproductive regime change operations in Libya and Syria, the failed nation-building enterprises in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the current NATO-Russia standoff in Ukraine.
Surely then, the time has arrived for a policy of retrenchment and a shift toward an approach based on a hemispheric conception of U.S. national security.
The old way of doing business has failed: Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, the U.S. has nearly 800 military bases and outposts spanning the globe; an annual national security budget of over $1 trillion; and formal bilateral defense commitments to 69 countries.
Still more, the U.S. has seemingly committed itself to the security and prosperity of countries to which it is not treaty bound, such as Israel and Ukraine.
The dangers of American overextension and Washington's desire to remake the world in its self-image have been apparent for decades.
For generations, revered analysts and thinkers across a wide range of the political spectrum — including George F. Kennan, George Ball, William Pfaff, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, Ronald Steel, Jack Matlock, Chas Freeman and John Mearsheimer — have been sounding the alarm.
Yet our professional political class has been unwilling or unable to consider common-sense alternatives to the so-called "grand strategy" of American global hegemony laid out by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992.
It was then, as under secretary for policy at the Pentagon, that Wolfowitz authored the Defense Planning Guidance, which posited that "If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action" in order "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival."
The new defense strategy, wrote Wolfowitz,
"….requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia."
In a curious twist of history, though Wolfowitz's doctrine was savaged by the press and publicly disavowed by the administration at the time, in the years that followed, little by little (under Bill Clinton) and then all at once (under George W. Bush) his vision became the cornerstone of U.S. national security policy. In the same way that George Kennan's Long Telegram set the template for U.S. policy during the 40-year Cold War, Wolfowitz's doctrine of global primacy set the agenda for the post-Cold War world.
Thirty years of Wolfowitz has been more than enough, thank you.
As the world continues to evolve and the center of gravity moves from the North Atlantic to Eurasia and the Global South, Washington would surely be better served if it abandoned its global pretensions and focused on securing its own neighborhood in the Western Hemisphere.
The U.S. can and should pursue a national security policy that abjures the costly strategy of U.S. military forward presence and brings American troops home. After all, as the decorated US Army Colonel (ret.) Douglas Macgregor has pointed out, "Forward presence actually discourages 'allies' and 'partners' from taking full responsibility for their own defense. In an age dominated by precision guided intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance-strike systems any forward presence force — aerospace, maritime, or ground — risks annihilation in the opening phase of any peer or near-peer enemy attack."
As has been said many times over, Europe is plenty capable of looking after itself both economically and militarily. Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, the U.S. should finally cede guardianship over matters relating to European security. Recall that as far back as 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his frustration with Europe's stubborn unwillingness to look after itself. According to the historian William R. Keylor, Eisenhower believed it was high time to to "wean" the Allies from their excessive dependence on the U.S. "and encourage them to make better efforts of their own."
The benefits of a less Euro-centric security policy are only too clear in light of current events. Given the emerging geopolitical realities in Asia, the U.S. might usefully rethink its posture in Europe. One way to signal to the Europeans that the time has come for them to stand on their own would be to open for the first time in NATO's history the position of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR) to non-Americans. While a full withdrawal from the alliance seems highly unlikely in the near to medium term, other options remain, such as drawing down the number of U.S. military personnel in Europe, currently estimated at 100,000. Such a shift would perhaps allay Russia's fears (and belligerence) regarding the North Atlantic alliance, and could provide an opening for the Europeans to at long last craft a new, comprehensive security architecture that takes into account the security interests of all of Europe.
Indeed, such a shift would allow the U.S. to deploy its resources to the Western Hemisphere. One way to do so would be to use the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) as a framework to implement mutual defense provisions between the three nations - with an eye toward expanding it to other strategically relevant countries, such as Panama and Colombia.
A hemispheric alliance stretching from the Arctic to the Panama Canal might reasonably be coupled with a New Marshall Plan for Latin America in order to win hearts and minds and to help address the scourge of drug and human trafficking that has long afflicted the region. After all, shouldn't securing the American border take priority over securing Ukraine's?
There is little doubt that proposals such as these will give rise to accusations of promoting isolationism — or worse. So be it.
The fact is that U.S. national security strategy has too often left us at the mercy of client states from Taiwan to Ukraine to Georgia to Israel: States that are all too eager to leverage, with the relentless agitation of their large and well-funded domestic lobbies, American largess and military might in disputes that have little if anything to do with the actual security of the United States.
A hemispheric posture would allow the U.S. to finally, three decades after the end of the Cold War, redirect our sorely needed resources back to where they belong: the American people.

For several decades, the Washington Post has functioned not only as a chronicler of national politics, but also as a social arbiter of the capital's elite. The two were fused in the paper's trendsetting 'Style' section, which was invented in 1969 by the legendary editor and scion of New England grandees Benjamin C. Bradlee. Two generations later, however, the Post is facing stiff competition for readers and attention in its own hometown from new rivals such as Politico, which was founded in 2007 by former Post staffers. But perhaps the most intriguing shift at the Post has occurred at the editorial page under the direction of Fred Hiatt. Throughout its history, the Post has been decisively shaped by different editorial-page editors. In writing this tribute, Hiatt, who joined the Post editorial board in 1996, was also expressing his own convictions. Hiatt's evident instinct to avoid the bromidic vapidity common in editorial pages is laudable. Adapted from the source document.