someone else

Dear Mr. Kristol, Nice try with the motte-and-bailey routine. The "motte" is that Iran must not get nuclear weapons, a point nearly everyone agrees on. But the "bailey" you're really defending is that we should intervene and force Iran to become a liberal democracy. Rejecting globalism is not the same as isolationism. "America First" means protecting U.S. interests with strength. Neutralizing Iran's offensive threat without dragging us into another nation-building fiasco would be a textbook example of "America First." But let's switch topics. I've been digging into the history of globalist "successes." One recurring theme is how elite efforts to democratize foreign regimes often lead to the opposite of what was promised. Look at Russia in the 90s: after the fall of USSR, Western NGOs rushed to make a liberal democracy out of Russia. They enriched oligarchs, fueled resentment, and laid the groundwork for the rise of Putin. But nobody speaks of this history. Globalists swept this under the rug, without any accountability. The same thing is happening in South America, but I digress. Let's pivot to Afghanistan, a failure that became too publicized to hide. After 2001, we launched a war that cost thousands of American lives and left tens of thousands more wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians died, millions more became refugees. But there was a moment of hope: the drafting of Afghanistan's 2004 constitution. The Journal of Democracy, the flagship publication of the NED (our quasi-governmental soft-power front), published an article by Barnett Rubin titled "Crafting a Constitution for Afghanistan." Rubin, who advised the UN during the process, openly admits that this constitution was written not by Afghans, but by NGOs, foreign governments, and elite consultants. Apparently, democracy doesn't mean government by the poeple. But... let's look at the end of the article. "My work on Afghanistan's constitution has been supported by the Open Society Institute." So the man who helped draft Afghanistan's new government, and documented it for America's own soft-power journal, gives full credit to George Soros for funding the process. Let that sink in. The UN's constitutional adviser in a U.S.-backed war zone was financially backed by Soros. And we wonder why the effort failed. So take note: America First is very much alive. But the Open Society's ideology of NGO-run democratization is dead. It failed in Afghanistan. It failed in Russia. It failed in Iraq. It fails wherever it's imposed. It's now up to the MAGA movement to give it a proper burial.