The coming reckoning for America's tripwire foreign policy

Rising powers are testing American resolve, brushing up against, and even tripping right over, American tripwires to see how we respond. They are calling our bluffs.

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons, IMOGI/iStock)

For neoconservatives beside themselves about President Trump's foreign policy misadventures and the prospect that he might get a political boost from presiding over the military operation that took down Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last weekend, Tuesday night offered a rare and fleeting chance for good cheer. That's when former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley received the Irving Kristol award at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and delivered a rousing sermon filled with the usual bromides about America being an exceptional, indispensable nation whose global leadership is, or ought to be, welcomed by all people and countries of good will.

For a moment, it felt just like old times — and that was the problem.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.