"But it's the very legitimacy of wanting better relations with Russia, given Trump's democratic mandate to pursue such a course, that makes Kushner's desire to hide the Trump transition team’s connections with the Kremlin from U.S. intelligence so dubious, especially if he did intend for the backchannel to continue, or to start, after the inauguration. That is the kernel of the illegitimacy here: not the effort to improve relations through a backchannel, but the extraordinary measures to keep it secret from one's own side."

"Trump's power has depended on his control over his Make America Great Again movement. And that's why he needs the Bannons of this world to keep pumping the zeal, in permanent campaign mode. But how long is it before the overthrow-the-world stuff that propelled a political insurgency starts to sound like tired regime propaganda uttered by tedious apparatchiks?"

"...[I]t was the globalization of the 1990s, inspired by the neoliberal economics of the 1980s, that pushed the West into a postindustrial phase in the first place, as manufacturing jobs moved to emerging markets. That was great for western shareholders; not so great for western factory workers. The left and right model of political normality started to come apart; 30 years later, we have Brexit, President Trump, and the prospect of Président Le Pen."

"Despite being on different sides of the Syrian civil war, Putin has managed to bring Riyadh into its diplomatic orbit through cooperation on oil policy, given how both Saudi-led OPEC states and Russia need substantially higher prices for government budgets to break even."

"...Saudi Arabia's energetic and ambitious young deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, appears to see beyond the immediate threat of U.S. shale to the Saudi oil industry....He is focused on the broader need for major reform of the Saudi economy.  Climate change will plainly be a major problem of the 21st century, and the world is moving away from fossil fuels: game over for an unreformed Saudi Arabia."

"We're clearly living through a historical moment. U.S. foreign policy, now forced through the democratic process to respond to blue-collar grievances, could move in drastically different directions. The question is whether it will evolve in a nationalist or internationalist direction."

"...[O]nly economic superpowers or dictatorships can drive foreign policy independently of domestic considerations — and Britain was neither in 1967. America is an economic superpower, but also a democracy, which explains both why foreign policy can be pushed beyond domestic considerations for long periods of time, but also why it can all too suddenly come crashing down."

"...[W]e now know that the notion that regime change leads to a better democratic or a humanitarian outcome is decidedly false. From Iraq, where the West tried a heavy footprint strategy, to Libya, where it opted for a light one, the idea that Europe or the United States can actually execute democratic change by force has been exposed as a fallacy."

"President Barack Obama could use this moment to devise a real political strategy, rather than oscillating between moralizing tirades against Putin's support for what remains of the Syrian state and the apolitical, meaningless mission of degrading the Islamic State. U.S. strikes in Syria should only be tied to positively defined goals, such as counterterrorism to defend U.S. interests, stopping the Islamic State from resupplying operations to Iraq, or supporting Kurdish enclaves."

"The stakes are high, because if the United States gets it wrong, it could soon find itself increasingly marginalized in East Africa, having lost the geopolitical center ground to China. As in so many other parts of the post–Cold War world, China offers a fundamentally different kind of relationship, one based on maximal private-sector links and minimal public-sector reform, as opposed to the United States, which tends to want both maximally."