Looking for more rightwing perspectives to balance your news diet? Here’s some more pieces analyzing Trump’s foreign policy, sanctuary cities and populism

Reading rightwing authors and sites is not an exercise in empathy. It’s about seeing what we can learn from and about them. In the Donald Trump era, it’s also about observing the contradictions in the incoherent coalition that elected him, and between that coalition and what’s left of the Republican establishment. Here are five pieces by conservative outlets and authors to read this week.

Burst your bubble: five conservative articles to read this week Read more

Publication: The American Conservative

Who wrote it? Andrew Bacevich, a long-time conservative critic of neoconservatives, the military and America’s endless wars. He’s got the credentials to do it – Bacevich has had stints as a military officer and a professor of history at Boston College.



Why you should read it: Bacevich offers sweeping remedies for draining the military-industrial swamp, but in the end he doubts that Trump will have the stomach for it, whatever candidate Trump may have promised. This is the clearest-eyed look yet at the disappointments likely to be awaiting the “America first” right.



Extract:

All signs indicate that, in one fashion or another, our combative next president will perpetuate the wars he’s inheriting. Trump may fancy that, as a veteran of Celebrity Apprentice (but not of military service), he possesses a special knack for spotting the next Grant or Sherman. But acting on that impulse will merely replenish the swamp in the Greater Middle East along with the one in Washington. And soon enough, those who elected him with expectations of seeing the much-despised establishment dismantled will realize that they’ve been had.

Publication: The Huffington Post

Who wrote it? Bonnie Kristian, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a thinktank set up by Rand Paul and the Koch Brothers to argue a position incorporating “greater reluctance to assert military force or even impose sanctions” on traditional US enemies like Iran and North Korea.



Why you should read it: Again, we see non-interventionist voices on the right trying to hold Trump to his campaign commitment to eschew overseas “nation-building” in the interests of making America great again. Trump’s moves since the election might make us wonder how serious any of his campaign rhetoric was, and whether he can hold his unique coalition together with the generals in his ear.

Extract:

Trump finds himself in the uphill battle of the century, as the Washington foreign policy establishment will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo of ill-advised intervention, escalation, and stagnation. Just one day before Trump held his Ohio rally, for example, Gen. Joseph Votel of US Central Command told a mostly neoconservative audience that the United States must keep a significant number of troops in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future to send a ‘strong message’.

Publication: The Los Angeles Times

Who wrote it? Legal theorists/academics David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley; together, they were the architects of the multi-state suit against Obamacare which commenced in 2010.

Why you should read it: If you want to know how conservative lawyers are planning to help out the Trump administration, this is a good place to start. Even as new sanctuary cities emerge to protect undocumented migrants from federal agencies, conservatives are preparing the legal arguments that might allow the Trump administration to shut them down. Liberal legal scholars will have ready responses to Rivkin and Foley’s brash claims. But this article might leave the rest of us pondering.

Extract:

It follows that, consistent with the anti-commandeering doctrine, Congress can require state, local or university police to tell federal agents when they arrest an immigrant present in the country illegally.

Publication: Financial Times

Who wrote it? Senator John McCain, a veteran Republican leader, who has an infamously rocky relationship with Donald Trump. He won re-election as senator for Arizona this year despite being consistently singled out by conservative Republicans as an avatar of the GOP establishment.

Why you should read it: This defense of free trade, and promotion of the now-imperiled TPP as a geopolitical tool would have been unremarkable six months ago. Now, it’s a sign that there are Republicans still prepared to disagree with the president-elect on trade and foreign policy – in the forums of the global elite. It also suggests that on some issues he may struggle to marshall a finely balanced Senate. (Anti-establishment GOP senators like Rand Paul are promising to be just as unruly).



Extract:

Politics abhors a vacuum and Asian countries will gravitate towards China if US influence is perceived as declining. Rumours of the next administration’s intention to reduce the US military presence in Asia are shaping that perception, too, to China’s advantage.

Publication: Wall Street Journal

Who wrote it? William A Galston, a columnist for WSJ and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Why you should read it: Liberal internationalism is on the wane, even among the people who used to be its biggest promoters. The establishment – even ostensible liberals – are accommodating themselves to the wave of populist nationalism. Read it if you want to see how elites are “normalising” Trumpism, and if you want to understand why we won’t be getting any help from centrists whose main concern is amassing power.



Extract: