from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Delighted you're joining us. If you're not already a subscriber, please do sign up wherever you get your podcasts.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be taking a deeper look at the state of modern conservative thinking in America. Now, there's no doubt that the last decade

has seen the fracturing of the political coalition built by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that led

the Republican Party and drove it for 30 years or more. A coalition composed very broadly of

business interests, evangelical Christians and national security hawks,

developed a governing philosophy that matched its respective interests, tax cuts and small government

on the economy, social and culturey, conservative approaches to issues such as abortion,

and a very assertive and aggressive foreign policy.

But disillusionment with the direction of the country in the last few years has seen that

coalition fragment that home-rising economic inequality and stagnation has cast doubt on the virtue of a single-minded tax-cutting pro-business approach, the advance of progressive ideology through the major institutions has radicalized social conservatives, and the failures associated with foreign policy interventionism, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, have discredited neo-conservatives

and revived an attraction to isolationism. In 2015, Donald Trump came along and channeling many of the

frustrations voters felt with Republican leadership, rested the party away from these groups and drove it in

new directions. While Trump's politics remained singular and highly personal, his continuing appeal owes, at least in part, to his offering of a distinctly new form of populist conservatism.

For some time, many conservatives have sought to rationalize and developed these new strands of conservatism to build a new governing philosophy.

In our next episode, next week, we'll take a look at what this means for domestic policy,

in economic and social policy especially.

But this week, we're going to examine the emerging contours of a new conservative foreign policy.

My guest is Elbridge Colby, one of the leading modern conservative national security thinkers.

Colby's a founding member of the Marathon Initiative, a think tank dedicated to preparing

the US for a period of great power

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