Administration, the george w. Bush administration. We want less engagement in the middle east. We want to turn our backs on a war on terror that seems to many people to be unwinnable. We want to provide less by way of military assurances, fire power in east asia, in europe and this is a replica in a sense of a pattern of American Foreignpolicy behavior after the First World War. People would take the stargel mind now that we had a president named Woodrow Wilson who went to war to make the world safe for democracy and after the war was over and after it was one a lot of americans concluded that the game hadnt been worth the candle. They did not want to remain engaged in global affairs. They did not want to police the world order that had been established at versailles so we turn inward to the 1920s and a Republican Administration and again in the 1930s for much of the roosevelt of administration at least until the late 1930s. The retreat im speaking of now largely replicate that pattern that history and the argument im making is doing so is not going to mean that our problems are going to abate. We are dividing a global disorder which is the subtitle of the book which is going to come around to haunt us. I started writing this book a couple of years ago. I think now in the beginning of 2015 some people might say with the rise of places in the invasion of ukraine, chinese aggressiveness toward its neighbors, iran steady march through some kind of Nuclear Capability so im worried about the pattern of American Foreignpolicy. One of the points that i make is retreat is a choice the one administration is made and one that this administration can reverse. Host your book was published in november so some of our listeners have read it and a lot have yet to read it so we are speaking to both those people who have read it and you have yet to read it. You make a distinction between retreat and decline on page 22 in fact. We are in retreat but not in decline. Guest right. Host is the difference between defeat and decline . Guest decline is something that happens to countries for reasons that are typically beyond the reach of anyone political leader or several political leaders to reverse. France has been in decline for a very long time. Generation after generation of french political leaders have tried to stem the decline. They havent succeeded. Japan is a country in decline for reasons that have to do for example with demography or attitudes about immigration. Prime minister shinzo abe found it really hard to turn that around as well. Russia by the way is in a tremendous amount of decline. I dont for a second think that the United States is in decline and theres an entire chapter in the book to explain precisely making a case that the United States for sure is going to remain the dominant economic political social power if you will as well as the military power throughout the rest of my life and probably my childrens life as well and maybe well beyond that but nations that are not in decline can still be in retreat because they make these choices in nations that are in decline as russia is can still be on the march as we are witnessing today. So thats the distinction that i want to draw and actually is because we are not in decline because we will remain the worlds number one that our enemies or adversaries are still going to be gunning for us one way or another whether its the militants of Islamic State whether its chinas general seeking to kick us out of east asia, whether his Russian Politicians seeking to revise the conclusions of the cold war. Host you mention in your subtitle the new isolationism and the coming global disorder. Why coming . Guest i wont say who it was but a prominent person who read and liked this book said i liked it very much. The only word is the word coming which should be the current global disorder but in fact i think its going to be you aint seen nothing yet. I think its going to be worse. For example of Falling Oil Prices all of us are celebrating as consumers driving a car and not having to pay four bucks for a gallon of gas and we think that it gives us leverage over countries like russia and iran that perhaps we didnt enjoy before. My sense in fact is that russia and iran will become more dangerous as Oil Prices Decline because they are now going to seek other ways to get out of their economic predicament. Typically you think of a country like argentina in the early 1980s wheeling economically. What did it do . It invaded the falcons. Iraq in the early 90s again under oil prices falling. They invaded kuwait so the decline is going to be worse. You asked about the isolationist and one of the objections to the book that ive those unintended consequences will come back to haunt us. On the whole we should be spending our National Resources not on a large military not on bases in japan or germany but right here at home. Rebuilding our infrastructure improving our schools and so on and so the case for isolationism or what i call isolationism is a strong case. Its a smart case and it has to be dealt with that way. He cant just be dismissed as a bunch of yahoos because we are making fundamental claims about what the United States ought to be about. I happen to think they are wrong but i dont want to dismiss or denigrate. Host is a columnist and editor from the editorial page of the wall street journal i take it you are conservative. Guest guess. Host would you call your book conservative . Guest at the heart of the book is a case for conservative foreignpolicy but conservative doesnt mean george w. Bushs freedom agenda and in fact much of my book is dedicated to criticizing what i see as some dangerous strains in the republican establishment foreignpolicy views over the last decade or so. When george bush sat in his second inaugural the policy of the United States was overtime to rid the world of tyranny. That struck me and i think struck a few other people as substituting utopianism per foreignpolicy. Foreign politics is like all politics in the realm of the possible. I dont think we ever going to find a world free of tyranny because we will never find a world free of human beings with malice and evil and ambition and greed in their hearts. So suddenly in the middle of the Bush Administration we became infatuated with this idea that we were going to plant the seeds of democracy in the heart of the middle east. That strikes me and i think most of our viewers would agree as an overly ambitious if idealistic and misbegotten foreignpolicy. Now its funny the wheel is turning and in you listen to a lot of people who associate with a tea party. Take sarah palin. Her view of the crisis in syria as he famously put it let allah sort it out. I dont believe in the sarah palin foreignpolicy doctrine when it comes to for example syria. Letting all is sorted out as has been 200,000 people dead and turning a domestic crisis in syria into a massive regional crisis. Its created a power vacuum in the chaos which has been filled by hezbollah in the Islamic State. Multiply their problems rather than kept them at arms length. So im a conservative foreignpolicy thinker and probably the most storied conservative on the editorial page today that my barbs are bipartisan. Host you were critical of both president obama and rand paul whos likely to run for president next year. In the indication that either of them were aides to then have read the book . Guest i know that friends of theirs have read the book because probably the nastiest reviews that i have had have been on the more libertarian leaning side of the aisle. There are democratic leaning thinkers who take to the task for other reasons. A columnist in the boston globe basically said this whole idea of retreat is exaggerated. Obama in fact has been engaged in a different way. I think a libertarian angle is more pronounced because they think they take the accusation of isolationism is some kind of stain on their character and what im trying to save them as no guys you are operating in a great foreignpolicy tradition. I just happen to think that since the Second World War it hasnt been an especially good policy. Host if about 4045 minutes left that i like to leave the book for couple minutes and talk about the author, that is yourself. You are 41 years old, is that correct . You were raised in mexico city. Describe what that was like. Guest yes. First of all i was born in new york and wondering why wikipedia keeps insisting that i was born in mexico. But i was born to a father who had been born in mexico and had a Family Business there when i was an event we moved there. That was where my childhood was spent. I think being an american raised outside of United States for a significant portion of time is terrific in two senses. First of all it means that i speak a Foreign Language fluently. Im acquainted with another culture intimately but it also gives me i think a much richer appreciation of the United States. As to give an example when i was a child we used every few months my parents would pack up our ltd Station Wagon and we would drive from mexico city to mcallen texas. I havent been back to mcallen texas since i was a child but as a a kid i remember it as heaven on earth. It was interesting because all you did was cross a little river river. The geography was the same but it was a different world. It was a world where you could put a glass under the tap in the sink and you could drink the water from the tap. I remember to this day that strikes me as miraculous. When im thirsty at night i dont get bottled water. I just put on the tap and drink a glass of water so it made me aware that a lot of what here in the u. S. We assume as mundane and everyday and taken for granted is actually quite extraordinary given what the rest of the world is like. Before the advent of bottled water to drink water in mexico you had to boil water or else he ran the risk of becoming seriously ill. So they gave me an appreciation of the specialness of the niceties that i dont think i would have had if i had been raised in westchester. Host do you consider yourself a mexicanamerican . Guest no im an american citizen. Put it this way during the world cup if mexico had gone up against the United States by would have rooted for mexico and im tremendously proud of what mexico has accomplished over the last few decades despite the headlines about the narcotraffickers. I love the country. Its one of the reasons why i think unlike many conservatives i have been very sympathetic to a more liberal immigration policy because i think what Latin Americans have contributed to American Life is just as great as what immigrants of all stripes and their forebears who came from lithuania and russia and other places have contributed. That too maybe alters my makes me a conservative with a slightly different angle. Host where did you guys go . Guest i went to boarding school in massachusetts at School Called middlesex. Boarding schools have a terrible reputation of cruel capricious salida schools. I thought it was not only fantastic education. I thought there were caring teachers and a greater emphasis on participation volunteerism. I started a little alternative newspaper in high school which gave me my first taste of the joy of writing something and having it read. Host why was it alternative . Guest there was a mainstream paper and we thought we could do better so we wanted to provide competition on campus. Host on political grounds or cultural . Guest mainly the official campus paper published for her five times a year and we were at dedicated school of british students to coming out every other week so we published many more additions and we ended up getting ourselves into all kinds of trouble by reveling the faculty and saying things that now in retrospect looks a little sophomoric but at the time seemed fun. Host have you been back to your high school . Guest i have come its beautiful. Host you went to chicago. What did you major in . Guest the short answer is i majored in political philosophy. They want answers i majored in program called fundamentals which really was a continuation of the Great Books Program where we would spend a small group of students and a professor senior professor would spend an entire semester sometimes two reading just one book so for instance reading aristotles nick mckeon ethics thomas mores utopia of reading the debates of the federalist and antifederalist. So was the kind of an effort to really understand these writers and thinkers as they understood themselves rather than the way Political Science or history operates which is more meta. Host were you a stirred and journalists in college . Guest i was not. I wrote one or two pieces for the school paper at the university of chicago i worked probably harder at the university of chicago than i have at any other time in my life. And i look back on it with mixed feelings because i think i was supposed to be having fun and partying in college and instead i was closing the library almost every other night. On the other hand when i look at what i write as a columnist, the way i think in my terms of reference they are so deeply influenced by what i was reading at the university of chicago that over time the echo signal becomes stronger not weaker and i feel that much more grateful that i had a firstclass education. Host after the university of chicago you want to the London School of economics . Why . Guest good question, seemed like a good idea of the time. If i could do it over again i would not have done it. Host why . Guest i think the time was misspent. Host and then what happened . Guest then i went to work for the wall street journal. I did a brief internship with the journal. When i was a graduate student on a lark i wrote an oped wrote an oped for my own edification and i thought lets see if we can get this published soy scented to the wall street journal and they published it. Its a wonderful feeling. To this day the memory of waking up in the morning that they had me the piece was published, this was before the internet. So i ran out to the nearest bookseller bought a copy of the paper anxiously turned the pages in their eyes on my byline in the wall street journal. And it was a marvelous sensation. The topic was nationalism and democracy. And so on the basis of that i was given an internship. I got in touch with the editor and applied for an internship. I was granted a twoweek internship in the Brussels Office of the journal and i dont know what exactly they were thinking but on the basis of a very brief internship they hired me. I went to work for the journal in new york city and shortly after that for a couple of years after that went to brussels. I started writing about the European Union a great deal. Brussels is a greater education and spending time among the very diverse europeans but then i started covering the middle east out of brussels. Not long after september 11 sort of out of the blue i got a phonecall from the publisher of the Jerusalem Post who asked me if i would be interested in being the editor of the paper. I was 27 years old at the time. Ipod it seems interesting. Host what was that like . Guest this was at the height at what is now or is the second intifada which was a period of recurring suicide bombings accommodating in a terrible bombing at the baton you, the city of the tonya seder dinner. Almost 30 people dead, an invasion by Israeli Forces of the west bank and the encirclement of kafka in 2000. The invasion of u. S. Forces of iraq which also coincided with my time there. It was like growing up fast as a journalist and having the responsibility for newsroom being thrust into a position of some managerial responsibility was eyeopening. There was tough. I was there for three years but every year felt like it was the equivalent of seven. Host those three years in israel how do you you think has affected the way you look at politics and philosophy . Guest well, you know i mentioned going to mcallen as a touchstone in my political worldview. When i was living in israel i met my wife there our first child was born in israel. There must have been four or five suicide bombings and i would say a five for 600yard radius of my apartment give or take. There was a suicide bombing which i remember vividly in january 2004 literally just down the street from where we lived. My wife and i were fussing over her newborn baby at 8 30 in the morning. We are to blast. I walked out and i was just about the first person on the scene of the bombing. It was a bombed out bus on the street that was at a little bit of an angle just about a block shy of the prime ministers residence Ariel Sharons residents. To see a suicide bombing and the effects of the suicide bombing right after the bombing not 20 minutes later when they have put out fires and started to cover the corpses but immediately afterwards gave you a visceral sense of the horror of terrorism, the horror of these kinds of attacks and so its important meant one hand i wish theyd never seen it and on the other hand has been instrumental to my moral and political education to understand what is really meant by the word literally by the word carnage, emphasis on carnage, what it means to blow people up and i have never lost sight of that. I think maybe this must be true of anyone close to the scene of Lower Manhattan on september 11 you just understand in a visceral sense that people who have conceded that close will never understand. Host midway through our interview and we will return to the content of the book but before i do that tell me why did you decide to write this book and how did that go . Guest my standard joke is that my mother had been urging me to write a book and if your mother nudges you long enough you end up writing it just to ge