After the Foreign Policy Catastrophe, What Then?

Our problem, writes the Zman, is that the politicians have handed over foreign policy to a permanent cabal.

The political class in the West has handed foreign policy and war making over to a professional class that operates independently from the political class.

And so, no matter who is president or controls Congress, the professional foreign policy elite keeps on keeping on.

It is this narrow group that has been running Ukraine policy since the Obama administration, and they are the people responsible for the current war.

OK, fellahs, so what is the point? What is the grand plan behind your two-decade Ukraine policy? What is the point of being anti-Russia? What is the point of all the little wars all over the place?

Zman doesn't say, but I have an idea. The foreign policy elite really doesn't know. It's just that they all sign on to the agenda, whatever it is, in order to join the club and get ahead.

Maybe we could use the Nazi Carl Schmitt notion that in any politics there must be an enemy.

So, for any foreign policy elite, there must be an enemy. Otherwise there wouldn't be a need for a foreign policy elite.

We could say that back in 1948 and the Berlin Airlift there was a real enemy, the state of Stalin's Soviet Union. And so we had 40 years of Cold War. Jolly good fun, and all, for the foreign policy elite. Sorry about the kids killed in Vietnam and in Iraq, and all.

But after the end of the Cold War, what are we trying to do? Well, we are fighting extremist nationalism, or an expansionist China, or a revanchist Russia, or mad mullahs, or Islamic terrorists. 

In other words, we are making it up. Oh, sorry, not we. I mean the international foreign policy elite.

But really, they don't have a clue.

Don't be discouraged. The Zman sees a silver lining to the black cloud. He thinks that the Ukraine thing will end in a bloody catastrophe. And for what?

This may be what saves the West from another catastrophe. The looming disaster in Ukraine cannot be covered up with clever messaging or media censorship.

And the disaster will delegitimize the foreign policy elite,and the global elite, and the Democratic party elite. And then we can sit down and do a reset and decide just what the heck we are trying to achieve with our politics. Other than give jobs to foreign policy experts that have got everything wrong for the last 30 years.