David Brooks

I was covering the end of apartheid, the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the Oslo peace process in the Middle East.

I was watching democracy be created.

And it seemed to me we were on a tidal wave of creating societies with better democratic values.

And so I think a lot of neocons like me or others and our elders supported the Iraq War for that reason, because they thought fighting for a democratic wave was the right thing to do.

What they did not sufficiently appreciate, what we and especially me did not sufficiently appreciate, the other thing I had said earlier about neocons, epistemological modesty.

Be careful about trying to change complex circumstances because you're going to screw it up.

And we ignored one of the core tenants of our own belief system.

We are so swept up in the moment.

And if we'd only gone back to the single most famous neoconservative foreign policy essay of all time was written by Jean Kirkpatrick.

And her argument was that if you're going to try to create a democracy in an authoritarian context, you need generations of civic planning, of civic organization, of moral foundations of a democracy.

You can't just imagine you can do it overnight.

And we forgot that lesson.

Yeah, I mean, when we withdrew, our friend Robert Kagan wrote a book called The Jungle Goes Back, which say when there's no social order

holding the world then the wolves take over and wolves like putin and she and others have taken over and people on this country on the populist right and sometimes on the left think oh that old neoliberal order that was all a scam it was a scam for america to exercise imperial hegemony hegemony but it was all just words but that liberal world order that people built after world war ii and that people like ronald reagan and john f kennedy and harry truman enforced

That really did restrain people.

And so the world has just become a more dangerous place.

And America has taken one of our great assets, which is our ideals.

Yeah, I've covered so many people around the world and they all, they want democracy, they want dignity.

And we have squandered that strength, an actual resource of strength.

And then the final thing, we replaced it now with Donald Trump.