“How did we get from ‘indispensable nation’ to ‘America First’?” That was the question that kicked off a spirited, yet civil debate between national security experts on David Eisenhower’s show, “The Whole Truth.” Representing team restraint was William Ruger, Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Charles Koch Institute, and Barry Posen, Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT. While William Kristol, editor-at-large of The Bulwark, and Michele Flournoy, Former Undersecretary for Defense Policy in the Obama administration, carried the banner for American primacy.

Flournoy opened by noting that the notion of “America First,” connotated an “isolationist stance” to foreign affairs, but also represented a political “backlash” against American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately, she concluded, it’s “a view that undervalues the strategic importance of…unique alliances.”

Kristol remarked that “America First” represented “a decline” based on “wistfulness,” “nostalgia,” “ill-spirit,” and “selfishness.” In defending the idea of America being an indispensable nation, he emphasized that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “didn’t just make it up and sell it, it was a fact.”

Ruger responded by pushing back against Kristol’s narrative, saying that “The reason why there’s a shift in sentiment towards America’s role in the world is frankly because the last twenty years of American Foreign Policy hasn’t been going very well for us in terms of promoting our safety and the conditions of our prosperity.”

Posen provided some helpful historical context by reminding the audience that the transition from an era when America was the sole great power to a world of several great powers has necessitated a change in how Americans understand their purpose on the world stage. Remarking on our failed interventions in the Middle East following the end of the Cold War, he said that “It’s hard to feed people a steady diet of fear, conflict, and war for decades without the American public scratching their heads and saying: ‘Can it really be true that all their problems are ours?’”

While Kristol and Flournoy acknowledged that not every problem on the globe is necessarily our problem and that our military interventions haven’t always gone as planned, they remained committed to a world lead by American power, both hard and soft. Ruger and Posen, on the hand, believe in robust American engagement, specifically through economic and diplomatic cooperation, however, they want to “use military power more prudently.”

As friends of the magazine know well, there was a time in Washington when questioning America’s role in the world, specifically our interventionism in the Middle East, could only be done sotte voce, lest you risk your job and future career. Today, the voice for restraint is growing, and it’s encouraging that such debates are taking place at the highest levels of American political life.

The whole debate is worth watching: