Aaron David Miller

Yeah.

It's the unpredictability.

It's my unpredictability that helps me advance matters.

I mean, I'm just not persuaded.

And I'm not suggesting that Trump foreign policy has been a total disaster.

I think it's been the notion of getting Europeans to step up and assume more responsibility for European security.

It's a hard lift for them, but it's a start.

And it's critically, I think, critically important, recognizing that China is a peer competitor

at least on the economic side, some of these things seem to have worked.

The Abraham Accords in the first term.

Abraham Accords.

But I just, I don't, when it comes to crisis and conflict, particularly this one, and let's be clear, this one will shape, however it turns out, the legacy, foreign policy legacy of this administration.

Yeah.

And remember, again, a piece with Dan Kurtz in New York Times.

This is our view.

I mean, you can talk to any number of other folks and they'd give you something different.

But based on our collective experience, including Dan's of almost 50 years dealing with this region, this region eats up transformational ideas.

It's more often than not a place where American ideas on war making and peacemaking exist.

go to die.

And at times I feel, Dave, like we're some sort of modern-day Gulliver wandering around in a part of the world that we don't understand, tied up by tiny powers, larger powers, large and small, and burdened by our own illusions.