"Nothing short of an outsider with nothing to lose by the humiliation of the old guard could restore a modicum of competence to American policy."

David Goldman writes,

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the world should hope for the election of Donald Trump next Tuesday. American policy has become a fetid morass in which ideology and influence-peddling jointly serve to insulate its leaders from the real world. It is not simply that America’s leaders are out of touch, but that they are in continuous touch with a fictitious construct of the world that excludes the possibility of policy course correction.

America’s policy elites are sleepwalkers, in the way that historian Christopher Clark described Europe’s leaders in August 1914 on the eve of the First World War. Five years and 500,000 corpses after the disastrous “Arab Spring” and the Libyan coup of 2011, the American elite still does not understand that today’s chaos in the Middle East is borne of American meddling. President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and the McCain mainstream of the Republican Party passionately believed that the Arab world had broken free of its tyrannical past and was en route to democracy. By destroying the old dictatorships, the United States simply opened the field to ethnic and sectarian war. Syria is in civil war, Iraq is close to it, and even Turey is at risk.

...For the most part, America’s foreign policy elite has chosen to eschew responsibility for its blunders. Their reputations would be safe with Hillary Clinton, who after all is one of them. The circle of self-protection is drawn so closely that nothing short of an outsider with nothing to lose by the humiliation of the old guard could restore a modicum of competence to American policy.

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