BRET STEPHENS

When it comes to foreign policy, the American people will ultimately reward not the party with the most ambitious vision but the party with the most sober and realistic one.

Among the many reasons why it’s a bad idea to try and contain a nuclear Iran is that containment entails two things most Americans don’t like: long term effort and high cost

Americans will stomach long wars only when the nation’s survival is clearly at stake.

The Pentagon doesn’t need more money. What it needs desperately is a functional procurement system …. The result [of not having one] is not just ordinary waste, fraud and abuse … but also deep and lasting damage to the country’s ability to project power and wage war.

The question of our time is rapidly becoming can government get things done?

[…] the opposite of not wrong isn’t necessarily right.

When things need shaking up, there usually isn’t a nice way of doing it. A good result might be worth a hurtful word.

Liberals intent on spending the next four years in a state of high-decibel indignation and constant panic are paving the way to Mr. Trump’s re-election.

Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention…It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage. A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference.

We are living in a period of competing moral certitudes, of people who are awfully sure they’re right and fully prepared to be awful about it. Hence the culture of cancellations, firings, public humiliations and increasingly unforgiving judgments. The role of good journalism should be to lead us out of this dark defile.

Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents.

The Arab world's problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.

Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.

Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy.

No adviser to a president is going to get his way all of the time, but at a minimum, that adviser should be able to defend the tilt of an administration's policy as if it were his own. If not, he should make room for those who can.

Censoriously asserting one's moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S.

Did you loathe and detest the Bush administration? If so, you'd probably say its ideas were horrible and their execution worse. Did you not loathe and detest the Bush administration? In that case, you might say its ideas were pretty good - only the execution often left something to be desired.

When it comes to trade, when it comes to standing up to countries like North Korea, when it comes to standing up to guys like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is not a conservative.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it'll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie.

We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.

Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature is that they so frequently conform to type.

I think Black Lives Matter has some really thuggish elements in it. Look - at the risk of being incredibly politically incorrect, but I guess that's my job - I think that all lives matter. Not least black lives.

I almost never listen to radio or watch political talk shows, especially if I happen to be on them.

Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate - entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world - turns out to be negotiable and reversible, depending on Donald Trump's whims and the furies of his base.