Alec, not that I want to be an “I told you so” kind of guy, but I lambasted the charade of Syria negotiations right here on the Corner not 24 hours after the agreement had been reached back in September. Any dictator worth his salt has taken the North Korean playbook as his bedside reading for the past decade and understands that, once the gullible Americans enter into a diplomatic-negotiation trap, they’ll twist themselves silly trying to pretend that things remain on track. It’s happening now with Iran, as well. In the Syria case, expect to see John Kerry assure the world that the agreement is still solid and that “progress” (the Holy Grail of diplomatists) continues to be made. Sure, we’re disappointed that they haven’t actually lived up to much of the agreement, but imagine the alternative! How could we be so neo-connish as to expect to hold them to their agreement through any threat of force or other action. No, welcome to the new normal, where our secretary of state paints history’s largest carbon footprint in the sky (287,000 miles in less than a year) while Assad, Rouhani, Kim, and the like go about the deadly earnest business of building up stocks of weapons of mass destruction. The triumph of hope over experience would be exhilarating if it weren’t so dangerous.