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In the 1974 film The Land That Time Forgot, the crew of a British ship torpedoed by a German U-boat in World War I crash upon the shores of a mysterious island. Though preoccupied with their ongoing geopolitical struggle, the British and Germans quickly discover something even stranger: a world full of dinosaurs and cavemen, untouched by the modern world or the passage of time, preserved perfectly in amber like a fossil.

At last week’s Aspen Security Forum, the dinosaurs were certainly less wondrous but no less untouched by time.

In the 1974 film The Land That Time Forgot, the crew of a British ship torpedoed by a German U-boat in World War I crash upon the shores of a mysterious island. Though preoccupied with their ongoing geopolitical struggle, the British and Germans quickly discover something even stranger: a world full of dinosaurs and cavemen, untouched by the modern world or the passage of time, preserved perfectly in amber like a fossil.

At last week’s Aspen Security Forum, the dinosaurs were certainly less wondrous but no less untouched by time.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised by this. Aspen, after all, is a bastion of the foreign-policy establishment, a place where policymakers and politicians go to hear their own groupthink reflected back to them. It is the natural habitat of the entity that Obama advisor Ben Rhodes once described as “the Blob.”

Yet it was still jarring to hear how out-of-date the conversations were at one of the United States’ premier foreign-policy conferences. Even as policy debates in Washington and elsewhere begin to shift toward the reality of a more multipolar world and a more nationalist, “America First” foreign policy, the conversations in Aspen remained encased in a feel-good atmosphere of bipartisan liberal interventionism.

The conference’s opening panel drew attention on social media thanks to former U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s remarks. Rice endorsed President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, asking whether it would really have been better to wait for an “imminent” threat. She criticized European leaders for opposing the Iraq War back in 2002, relitigating a debate that ended decades ago. As Rhodes—one of the few dissenting voices among the speakers—noted near the end of the conference on Friday morning, this is despite votes as far back as 2008........

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