The Big 5 and the Sad State of Foreign Policy in 2016

Rubio is a naive neocon. Everybody hates Ted. Hillary is a hawk. Bernie has bigger fish to fry. And who the hell knows how Trump would screw up the world.

What will the 2016 election mean for U.S. foreign policy? I've been trying to avoid that question, because I find the entire spectacle of the campaign disheartening. I don't just mean Donald Trump; it's more the sad reality that my country is spending more than a year and billions of dollars selecting a new leader, with the media breathlessly reporting every twitch in the polls and every goofy moment in the debates. No other advanced democracy does business this way; Canada just had the longest election in its history, and it lasted only 78 days. Lucky them. To be honest, I haven't wanted to jump into this circus until it was absolutely necessary.

As I write this, Iowa voters are casting the first votes in this already long slog toward the White House. By the time you read it, the results will be in, and a mountain of verbiage will have been written or uttered trying to discern what the votes of a select group of voters in an unrepresentative rural state might mean....

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