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Confessions of a Libertarian Neocon
Freedom, security, and American foreign policy: Grappling with paradox
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The latest Trump administration drama — the abrupt announcement of an imminent United States withdrawal from Syria and a drastic reduction of troops in Afghanistan, and the resignation of U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and special envoy for the anti-Islamic State coalition, Brett McGurk — has brought into sharp focus the division between interventionists and anti-interventionists on both the left and the right. Donald Trump’s move to pull out of Syria has been decried by Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio.
Meanwhile, leftists like Michael Tracey have cheered Trump’s move and dismissed the reaction as knee-jerk pro-war conventional wisdom; so have my friends and colleagues at Reason, some of whom think that between…