Spring 2008

 Comments

In the maiden issue of World Affairs, David Rieff, a writer of the center-left, and Andrew Bacevich, a writer (depending on the subject) either of the left or the right, advanced a fairly straightforward proposition—that, allowing for and acknowledging various detours and blunders along the way, “a consensus about the U.S. role in the world unites most of the right and most of the liberal-left in this country,” as Rieff put it, “and this view is grounded in the theology of American Exceptionalism.” In this issue, Robert Kagan, a writer from the center-right, endorses and amplifies the claims of his ideological opposites, noting that the entire discussion “takes place within the narrow parameters of a common paradigm.”
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