One of the reasons it matters that Biden has begun elevating institutionalists instead of ideologues: institutionalists may share the ideologues' posture in the Gulf but are much less reckless. Institutionalists probably won't want to blow up Arab-Israeli peace. Ideologues will.
Ppl have to understand that a lot of the praise from center and right on Biden's fopo choices thus far is not *policy agreement* overall, it's recognition that these are folks you can disagree with but actually have a debate on policy with.
And they value the architecture of America's place in the world. I don't have any illusions about their preferred approach to Iran (bad). But would they sacrifice half a million Syrians for it? Would they trade Israel for Qatar over it? Less likely than the ideologues.
The idea that conservatives such as myself are fooling ourselves on a Biden foreign policy is a total misunderstanding of the situation. Sid Blumenthal won't be convincing this president to invade Libya while signing rebuilding contracts. That's a relief to us too!
Obviously it'd be best if Biden surrounded himself with ppl who *truly* understand the importance of the Trump team's Mideast peace deals. We don't know if that's too much to hope for at this point. But if the choice is between institutionalists and arsonists, prefer the former.
Anyway, there's a belief expressed on this site a fair amount that conservatives are naïve about this. We're not--but if you think there's *no* difference between Ben Rhodes/Susan Rice/Pod bros and Blinken/Sullivan then you miss an important point about the way fopo is made.
American political discourse would benefit from greater recognition that not everything is the same as everything else.
Also! Israelis may disagree with this! I am not speaking for any kind of broad international alliance here, I'm giving the perspective of a swath of American conservatives that holds that political parties are not uniform blobs.
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