“It is the Grating Habit of Partisans on the Winning Side to Tell the Losers How They Might Have Done Better”

21 February 2013, 2341 EST

And thus Bret Stephens lambasts Democrats for daring to tell the GOP to moderate its foreign policy. Stephens’ recipe for “Getting the GOP’s Groove Back“? Obama foreign policy, but with an assist from the Resolve Fairy on Iran.

I’m not kidding. If you have a Foreign Affairs subscription, you can check it out for yourself.

The sad thing is that once you wade through Stephens’ boilerplate invocation of supply-side economics (it works! Kennedy cut taxes! Europe bad!) and his anodyne proposals for how big-defense and small-government conservatives can teach one another important lessons… well, there’s just no there there.

Which places the Wall Street Journal‘s foreign-affairs columnist in essentially the same place as the Romney-Ryan ticket. That’s some groove.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.