Brooks: Simple Government at Home and Abroad
The way not to approach the Middle East is as a chessboard on which the grandmasters of American foreign policy can impose their designs. This is the sort of overconfident thinking that leads policy makers to squander moral authority by vowing to destroy Assad one month and then effectively buttressing him the next.
.. Right now there is bipartisan inconsistency over the effectiveness of government. Republicans think government is a bumbling tool at home but a magnificent instrument abroad. Democrats think government is a magnificent instrument at home but a bumbling tool abroad. In reality, government is best when it chooses the steady simple thing over the complex clever thing.