https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an...hael-doran

Kind of an odd piece. Written as though the author could read Doran's mind. Doran is a Middle East expert who has committed the crime of agreeing with Donald Trump. But its an interesting discussion of various aspects of Middle East policy.

"...Instead, he continued, too many of these people, under the sway of progressive politics, turned to moralism instead. “Progressivism,” he said, “is a modernist Protestant utopianism that believes in the perfectibility of mankind and believes the U.S. should be the vanguard bringing about the perfection of humanity. Trump revealed to us that much of the foreign policy elite on the right is simply the muscular wing of this progressivism. So traditional ideas going all the way back to Thucydides about how states should protect their interests are discarded, and a call for prudence is very easily depicted as a debased, immoral position....”

Such a task, he added, requires time and caution. “When you’re the greatest power on earth,” he said, “even the small decisions you make affect the lives and deaths of other people, and it can get dangerous when you start having fantasies about remaking the world instead of being prudent about how you use your power.”

That is very clearly what Doran believes. What is remarkable and frightening is that his insistence on such basic, level-headed strategic principles has left him nearly alone in a city whose elites, both Democratic and Republican, seem united in their refusal of any accountability for even their most glaring mistakes—like the Iraq War and the Iran deal—and have instead found common purpose in proclaiming their own crushing moral and intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. History has been kind to Doran on a number of big questions. Where it will fall on his latest move, and on Trump in general, remains to be seen...."