“In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built—and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
That was the bombshell statement President Donald Trump dropped during his first major foreign policy speech abroad in Saudi Arabia on May 13, highlighting the ongoing feud between interventionism and restraint within the U.S. foreign policy community. Though Trump’s speech lambasted the interventionists, and there are signs of a course correction, the battle between these two camps is far from settled.
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