America in Retreat 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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“A balance of power may seem plausible in theory. But the nature of power is that it seeks preeminence, not balance.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“Maybe there’s an explanation for why Americans seem congenitally disposed to ask “Why not?” rather than “Why?”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“No great power can treat foreign policy as a spectator sport and hope to remain a great power.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“Five of the ten richest people in the country, and a third of the richest fifty, hold official government positions.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

“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.”
― Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder