Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

thehill.com/opinion/nation… When choosing among Democratic candidates, remember that foreign policy is the arena in which the president has the most power and makes the most difference. It's also the realm where serious mistakes can least be undone.

In a worst case, a serious mistake, in a world as febrile as ours is now, could cost us our country. Even a minor foreign policy mistake could cost someone *else* his or her country.

The priority, in choosing the next president, must be the candidate's knowledge, seriousness, judgement, and experience in foreign policy.

There will be no time to learn on the job.

All the shit Trump (and his predecessors) have flung will be hitting the fan exactly the next president takes office, or soon thereafter.

So it's nice that Elizabeth Warren, say, has a plan for student debt;

and we can have a lot of good long debates about which candidate is the most sensitive and woke and breaks glass ceilings; and whose tax and budget proposals make the most sense--but ignore all of that.

Choose the candidate who will arrive on the job with the largest stock of knowledge, wisdom and experience with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Europe, the Middle East in general, Mexico, the Northern Triangle; and in general, history, diplomacy, statecraft, and war.

Choose the candidate with the best geopolitical instincts and the keenest ability to understand the effects of rapid technological change on a wildly complex world; the one most likely quickly to understand information warfare, new weapons systems and new defense doctrines--

all at a time when the global outlook for liberal democracy is as bleak as it's been since the 1930s.

The president will have to unite the country sufficiently that when a crisis arises (and it will), most of the country will be willing to trust him or her.

He or she must be able clearly to communicate in a crisis, not only to Americans but to the rest of the world.

He or she will inherit a demoralized State Department that's missing critical departments, resources, and institutional knowledge. It will have to be rebuilt.

The president will need to understand, from the first day, how our security, defense, and intelligence bureaucracies work. He or she will need the confidence of those institutions, and will need to restore the country's confidence in them, too.

He or she should not be ideologically inflexible: The world is not going to obey whatever theories of war and peace the candidate picked up from a Pete Seeger concert. We're in a new world--one where Facebook issues its own currency and the antibiotics are running out.

We'll be electing a war president. We're already at war--in at least eight places--and every one of these conflicts has the potential to escalate. It isn't what we want, at all, but we've made so many mistakes, since the end of the Cold War.

A quarter-century of folly, indifference, and incompetence in statecraft (culminating in the orgiastic burning of American influence under Trump and our placement on a warp-speed trajectory to terminal geopolitical decline) means a henhouse of chickens will come home to roost.

This should make your decision about which candidate to vote for in the primaries simpler. Vote for a candidate with knowledge, seriousness, prudence, experience, and wisdom about foreign policy, geopolitics, peace, and war.

We'll have more than one chance to get health care right. But if we want to get through the next decade intact, we need some miracle solution of Pericles, Augustus, Bismarck, Gladstone, Talleyrand, Lincoln, and Churchill in the Oval Office.

And failing that--not a total lightweight or a neophyte.