Conservatives look to Burke most commonly with regard to domestic policy, but a Burkean instinct can be sound in the foreign arena as well.

The world order that the West has championed since World War II has left the United States by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. We have not seen an “end of history” and a worldwide triumph of liberal democracy, but things could be a lot worse. The Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc have disintegrated, there have been no nuclear exchanges, there are few Communist countries left (and by far the largest of them has a semi-capitalist economy), the developing world is indeed developing because of free markets, and Islamism is on the ropes. With American foreign policy’s blend of realism and idealism, and its cautious interventionism, we are also looked up to and followed, albeit sometimes grudgingly.

That doesn’t mean that the system has worked perfectly or that improvements can’t be made, but we should be wary of radical change to that system and its alliances and division of roles, as well as of pursuing possible new friends at the expense of old ones. There is a time and a place to “move fast and break things,” but that’s a bad idea in U.S. foreign policy. As Burke wrote in his Reflections, we ought “to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians.”