Thread by @shadihamid

My new @WCrowdsLive essay:

"I'm tempted to conclude that, despite laying claim to the skills and talents of the best and brightest, America is uniquely bad at foreign policy, particularly as it relates to anything having to do with Muslims"

wisdomofcrowds.live/a-lament-for-a…

Short of having a president with a fundamentally different outlook toward Muslim-majority countries, I'm not sure a better U.S. foreign policy is possible. Or, at least, someone at the level of Tony Blinken or Jake Sullivan, neither of whom have a particular interest in this

The Coordinator for the Middle East under Biden is Brett McGurk, who while competent is not an original, strategic thinker on these issues. Which is fine—if you think Middle East policy just needs to be competently managed

Many friends and colleagues have looked at this reality and concluded that the US will probably never get better on Middle East-related issues, and so it's better for us to limit our footprint and basically give up on the prospect of making things better

I disagree with this view, but I'm more sympathetic to it today than I would have been 10 years ago. I mean, we really do suck on the Middle East. That said, I think it's plausible that a future NSA or Sec of State might come with a different set of ideological commitments

Also, I'm starting to lose faith in the very idea of "competence." I've always been skeptical of technocracy (for various philosophical reasons), but part of me suspects that the Biden era will have done considerable damage to the notion that competence is enough

We'll have to put "competence" in scare quotes from now on