In a speech given to the Ben Franklin Fellowship, a community of foreign policy professionals dedicated to promoting the American national interest, the accomplished international relations consultant John Hulsman discussed his new book, The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism.
Phillip Linderman, a frequent contributor to The American Conservative and a retired Foreign Service officer, gave the introduction for Hulsman’s remarks on the long tradition of realism within American foreign policy and the prospects of a realist coalition of “Jeffersonians and Jacksonians” as exemplified in the Trump movement.
Hulsman highlighted the thesis of his book, which shows how modern realists stand in the shoes of many of the greatest statesmen of American history, including George Washington and John Quincy Adams. Hulsman even discussed FDR’s realist streak, pointing out that the 32nd president developed his views on grand strategy from the English tradition, favoring the U.S. as an offshore balancer rather than an ideologically motivated hegemon.
Hulsman praised the former President Trump for moving the Republican Party away from liberal interventionism.
“One of the best things that Donald Trump did, whether he knows it or not, doesn’t matter, and whether historians ever give him credit for it or not is simply that the neocons have been kicked to the curb,” he said.
Hulsman also argued that the 2024 primaries have shown that realists, be they the heirs of the Jeffersonians (small-government ones) or Jacksonians (populists), can comfortably win 70 percent of a Republican nomination race. He argued that “the Republican Party had fundamentally changed and wasn’t going back.”
Hulsman explained how distinctively un-conservative and un-American liberal internationalism is. He highlighted how the neoconservatives “wanted to have a global revolution, then for socialism and Trotskyism, and now for democracy.”
“It’s still imposing things upon people at the point of a gun,” he said. “It’s not going to work.”
Hulsman likewise pointed out that it is natural for the neocons to join the Democratic Party, given that neoconservative foreign policy, centered around social engineering in the form of “democracy-building,” is much more similar to Democratic views of social engineering than conservative support for tradition and particularity.
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