Zusammenfassung:
Classical liberals have been more preoccupied by domestic policy and institutions than by international affairs. This paper makes the case for a classical liberal foreign policy outlook that could address the collective challenges facing free societies. In the United States, libertarian foreign policy thinking has been outsourced to structural realism. However, in the form in which it is deployed to make the case for restraint, such realism often contradicts basic analytic and normative tenets of classical liberalism. The current international situation is a wake-up call for classical liberals to rethink and update their foreign policy intuition to an era in which the international environment seems less conducive to classical liberal values than much of the post-war period.