Reject their evidence based on neolib propaganda

OUT WITH THE OLD Despite the disappointments of the past 25 years, the American foreign policy elite remains convinced that global leadership is their birthright and that Washington must continue trying to force other countries to conform to U.S. dictates. This perspective is an article of faith at almost every foreign policy think tank inside the Beltway and is repeatedly invoked in task-force reports, policy briefs, and op-eds. A similar groupthink pervades the U.S. media, where unrepentant neoconservatives and unchastened liberal internationalists monopolize the ranks of full-time pundits; proponents of realism, restraint, and nonintervention appear sporadically at best. The result is that foreign policy debates are heavily skewed in favor of endless intervention. Moving back to a more realist grand strategy will require broadening the parameters of debate and challenging the entrenched interests that have promoted and defended a failed foreign policy. The clubbiness of the foreign policy establishment has also produced a disturbing lack of accountability. Although the community contains many dedicated, imaginative, and honorable individuals, it is dominated by a highly networked caste of insiders who are reluctant to judge one another lest they be judged themselves. As a result, error-prone officials routinely fail upward and receive new opportunities to repeat past mistakes. Consider the officials responsible for (and the commentators who cheered on) the bungled Middle East peace process, the misguided expansion of nato, the botched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the cia's torture of detainees in the war on terrorism, the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of Americans, the disastrous nato intervention in Libya, and the American machinations in Ukraine that gave Russia a pretext to seize Crimea. None of those officials or commentators has suffered significant professional penalties for his or her mistakes or malfeasance. Indeed, nearly all of them still enjoy prominent positions in government, think tanks, the media, or academia. No one is infallible, of course, and a desire to hold people accountable could be taken too far. Policymakers often learn from past mistakes and become more effective over time. But when the same people keep making the same errors and neither recognize nor regret them, it is time to look for new people with better ideas. Despite the stagnation within the foreign policy establishment, the prospects for a more realist, more restrained U.S. foreign policy are better today than they have been in many years. For all his flaws, Trump has made it easier to propose alternatives to liberal hegemony by expressing such disdain for the elite consensus. Younger Americans are more skeptical of their country's imperial pretensions than are their elders, and some new members of Congress seem bent on clawing back some of the control over foreign policy that presidents have amassed over the past 70 years.