Should America be the World's Policeman?
Lee Fang and I opposed interventionism in a debate with Bret Stephens and Jamie Kirchick in New York this week. Technically we won, but it felt like a big loss
On Wednesday night, in the Peter Norton Symphony Space on the Upper West Side, Lee Fang and I debated New York Times contributor and Atlantic Council fellow Jamie Kirchick and Times columnist Bret Stephens. The event, hosted by the Free Press and FIRE and moderated by Bari Weiss, turned on the question: “Should the U.S. Still Police the World?”
We won, but absurdly, moving opinion two points from an astonishing 81%-19% in favor of “World Policing” to 79%-21%. Lee was terrific and may have dealt the deciding sequence via an exchange with Stephens on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. You can read his excellent opening and closing remarks here. There is not yet a video to post, a fact I’m not mourning.
I performed poorly. My weakness in debates is temper and just being in a building with Stephens, who last year wrote “20 Years On, I Still Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War,” put me on the edge of losing it. In opening remarks the coiffed, Yale-educated Kirchick riffed on nineties TV while Bret told a long joke about a pig with a pegleg, the one whose punchline is, “You don’t eat a pig like that all at once.” The crowd roared.
A few thoughts on the event, and my reasons for joining Lee in believing the U.S. should not continue to police the world:
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