To avoid escalations of this sort, the Trump administration should now lay out a positively defined political vision for the Middle East, which would accompany and tether its negatively defined anti-Islamic State and anti-Iranian goals. At this time, the fundamental part of this vision must be a clear U.S. position on the future of Kurdish-held areas in Iraq and Syria.

"The biggest hole in the Tory battle plan should have been obvious: Whether or not one thinks Brexit is a good idea, it is plainly not about stability, or continuity. It’s potentially the most radical change in U.K. domestic and foreign policy in half a century, a step that will change the daily lives of everyone in this country and that of their children."

"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."

"And the fight over Scotland's future will be no less vicious than the fight to come in England, now that the incoherence in the Leave campaign's vision has to be ironed out in the real world. Indeed, the Leave campaign's promises, light on fact, and heavy on fantasy, are inherently contradictory."

"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."

"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."