What the "national conservatives" get wrong about liberalism

Without the liberal order that national conservatives dislike, the sovereignty of nation-states would quickly give way to a different and older form of politics—one where great states vie with each other to expand their influence, using small states as pawns to be traded or sacrificed in their contests of power. To dismantle the liberal world order would be to invite just such a scenario back into the present. Perhaps national conservatives should read Edmund Burke a little more carefully: Because “circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom,” he tells us, the prudent statesman seeks “at once to preserve and to reform.”

But national conservatives are neither cautious nor prudent. They more closely resemble the very radicals Burke chided, critics of the establishment who “regard all things only on the side of their vices and faults, and view those vices and faults under every color of exaggeration.” Instead of working for its careful reform, national conservatives would raze the established global order to the ground. Blinded by revolutionary fervor, they are unable to see how the nation-states they profess to love depend upon the very liberalism they so deeply despise.