At the 2019 National Conservatism Conference:
The nationalist view, according to Thiel… asks a simple question: Is it good for America?
A nationalist, Thiel argued, simply asks what Silicon Valley has done to improve the lives of American citizens. Outside of the Bay Area, he said, the answer is not much. Social media may consume more of our lives, but it’s not clear it’s making those lives better.
[The Iraq War] would have sparked the cold calculation of weighing the value of the oil against the cost of the war — a calculation that would have made it clear from the start that the war wasn’t worth it.
But
The problem is that it is all diagnosis and no cure. Thiel challenged important preconceptions but failed to even gesture in the direction of answers.