Can Republican Intellectuals Survive the Age of Trump?
A Q&A with foreign-policy mandarin Eliot Cohen on America’s retreat from the world.
Making America isolationist again?
Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Who was most upset about Donald Trump’s shocking presidential victory? (Other than Hillary Clinton, that is.) A good place to start is with these 122 Republican foreign-policy mandarins who wrote an open letter months before the 2016 election declaring him “utterly unfitted to the office.” In return, Trump has declared them utterly unfitted to be part of his administration. And their interventionist foreign-policy leanings as well.
So, how are things going in the political wilderness? To answer the question, I had a talk this week with one of the most prominent Never Trump intellectuals, Eliot A. Cohen. Cohen is vice dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a former counselor at the State Department under George W. Bush and the author, most recently, of “The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.” Here is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion: