Jim Crawford: End of era comes for sensible foreign policy
Conservative principles face implementation challenges as policy meets political complexity.
Crawford treats “sensible foreign policy” as a settled tradition that only one party can responsibly inherit. But the premise collapses when the same experts who built that tradition also greenlit misadventures, muddled objectives, and endless commitments with little to show for them. What’s missing is the conservative worry that foreign policy became a self-licking bureaucracy: big promises, vague end states, and a public asked to trust decisions made behind closed doors.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
With the invasion of Venezuela and the threat to “take” Greenland, the Trump administration has ended 80 years of U.S. policy without so much as a peep from his Republican [...]
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Crawford treats “sensible foreign policy” as a settled tradition that only one party can responsibly inherit. But the premise collapses when the same experts who built that tradition also greenlit misadventures, muddled objectives, and endless commitments with little to show for them.
What’s missing is the conservative worry that foreign policy became a self-licking bureaucracy: big promises, vague end states, and a public asked to trust decisions made behind closed doors. Questioning long-standing assumptions is not recklessness. It is democratic accountability in a domain that too often avoids it.
An America First approach starts with national interest, not institutional nostalgia. That means credible deterrence, clear objectives, and fair burden-sharing from allies.
The principle at stake is public trust. A foreign policy that cannot explain itself to citizens will not endure, no matter how “sensible” it sounds on paper.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.