Why Isolationists and Interventionists Are Both Wrong | Yoram Hazony

American Thought Leaders

The Epoch Times

Government, News, Politics

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

For years, U.S. strategic missteps have empowered Tehran and Beijing, according to political theorist Yoram Hazony. Now, as a new strain of isolationism grows in America, Hazony says, both isolationism and hyper-interventionism have key flaws.

In this episode, we dive into President Donald Trump’s distinct foreign policy approach as well as what Hazony sees as an assault on nation-states and their right to independent decision-making.

Nationalism has been falsely vilified, and global governance has become the new mantra, he says.

Hazony recently released a revised edition of his 2018 seminal work, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which played a key role in bolstering the global national conservatism movement. Hazony is also Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts the National Conservatism Conference in the United States, Britain, and Europe.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The theory is that there's only two types of foreign policy, which the American media
0:06.3	constantly reinforces. I don't think the administration buys that.
0:09.7	Did American strategic missteps ultimately empower Tehran and Beijing?
0:14.8	What do both isolationists and interventionists get wrong? And how is Trump defying these old
0:20.6	foreign policy labels?
0:22.3	In this episode, I sit down with political theorist and philosopher Yeram Hazzoni.
0:27.0	He recently released a revised edition of his 2018 seminal work, The Virtue of Nationalism.
0:33.3	He is also the founder of the NatCon Conference, which is meeting in Washington, D.C. early next week.
0:38.3	The old American, British, European value of having independent nations
0:45.3	was eliminated after World War II through this despicable maneuver of allowing Hitler to teach us political theory. And the result was fueling the move
0:59.7	towards eliminating borders. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellick.
1:06.9	Yeram Hazoni, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Good morning. My pleasure, Jan.
1:12.2	So I really want to talk to you about Trump's foreign policy.
1:17.1	After we saw the reactions to his actions in Iran, there's kind of almost like a schism among
1:25.5	his supporters. What happened?
1:28.3	And what is Trump's foreign policy?
1:31.3	Well, there's a lot of confusion about it, which stems from a very old misperception about
1:41.3	foreign policy, which the American media constantly reinforces.
1:47.7	The theory is that there's only two types of foreign policy.
1:53.5	One of them is, you know, isolationist, which means the U.S. basically has no real significant interests in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, wherever.
2:06.8	And therefore, whenever there's trouble anywhere, the prescription is supposedly to stay out of it.
2:15.7	So there's that. And then opposed to that is neocons,
	...

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