The Greenland/Gulf of America nonsense is a good example of why people who study foreign policy should be careful of transposing systematic views about grand strategies and whatnot onto policy-makers.

To me what's more revealing is whether or not a candidate is capable of/ thinking critically about America's role in the world, seeing that American power is not always constructive (to say the least), understanding why others might resent that power, and, in short, having the capacity to imagine that we might be wrong.

George W. Bush campaigned/

This is a solid review of Coll's book by Gideon Rose, but Rose, and to a lesser extent Coll, still lean a little too hard on the "misperception" thesis of the Iraq War, with the resulting narrative of the war as a "tragedy."

Rose, for example, argues/foreignaffairs.com/reviews/how-ir… that: “The Iraq War shows what happens when neither side knows either.”

The US misread Saddam, believing that he was trying to preserve WMD programs or actual WMD. Saddam misread the United States, believing that it already knew he was disarmed and just wanted to use/