This week, our guest is Stephen Wertheim, Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We discuss the origins of “isolationism,” historical hypotheticals, the United States’ relative interests in the Middle East, Europe and Asia, Ukraine and Taiwan, and an “America first” policy for the Democratic party, among other subjects.

Time Stamps:

• 00:00:45 PhD in history and pivot to policy 
• 00:07:38 Charges of “isolationism” from the 1930s through Trump 
• 00:15:54 Should the US have done anything differently during WWII or the Cold War?
• 00:19:43 The collapse of the Communist bloc and American primacy unbound 
• 00:25:00 Need to draw down in the Middle East
• 00:26:48 Let Europeans take greater charge of their own security 
• 00:36:00 How should the US react to the rise of China
• 00:41:12 Taiwan and Ukraine
• 00:51:47 An “America first” policy for the Democratic party

*The Monterey Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and produced by University FM.