Rich, back in 2008, a pretty prominent lefty journalist asked me what conservatives were going to do now that our national security strategy policies been completely discredited. I told him that I wasn’t at all worried, because Obama was destined to spend his whole presidency re-legitimizing them.

The reason I thought this inevitable was that most of the Bush administration’s national security policies were just consensus concessions to reality. The Iraq War wouldn’t have happened except for Bush, of course. But the rest of it — the enhanced interrogations, the terrorist surveillance program, the drone strikes — these all seemed controversial to the public, but in reality they were mostly a matter of broad consensus within the national security establishment, Democrat and Republican alike.  

The Barack Obama of 2008 will go down in history for having raised expectations higher than any presidential candidate in living memory, especially compared to what he had to have known he could reasonably deliver. In fact, his campaign almost intentionally misled supporters, by making it look like all U.S. foreign policy were George W. Bush’s fault, and that he Obama would come in and change everything that people hated about Bush’s policies.

Of course, most of the problems in U.S. foreign policy exist because the world is problematic.