The challenge for Washington is no longer whether it possesses sufficient capabilities, but whether the political system can align those capabilities behind a coherent long-term priority.
So, to succeed in the trough of graft, a politician must have a profusion of scandals, so many of them all at once such that they would eventually overwhelm the system’s capacity to cope.
The price of flippancy in the White House and the criminal intransigence of the Tehran regime is being paid by the Iranians who, after nearly half a century of cruel dictatorship, deserve to be free.
The summits are not endpoints. They are the mechanism by which two countries, which can neither resolve their differences nor afford to rupture them, manage the interval between crises.