America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictatorsby Jacob HeilbrunnLiveright, 2024; 249 pp.Jacob Heilbrunn, who is the editor of The National Interest, is dismayed that some leading figures on the American Right show an affinity for European dictators; he has in mind especially the “Hungarian strongman” Viktor Orbán and the Russian president Vladimir Putin. This admiration, not the foreign policy realism they claim to champion, leads these figures on the Right to sympathize with Putin’s expansionist war against Ukraine rather than defend democracy by coming to the victim’s aid. The affinity is nothing new, Heilbrunn argues, but has been a pattern for over a century. Heilbrunn writes:A variety of politicians on the Right, too, have regularly embarked upon quixotic quests
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