It is unusual to find academics at some of America's most elite universities in enthusiastic agreement with Donald Trump, who is perhaps the least intellectual president in American history. But if a spate of recent books and articles is any indication, the president and the professors are united in scorn for America's foreign policy elite.
The argument this unlikely alliance makes — that the foreign policy elite is a corrupt cabal that has led the country from disaster to disaster — is fashionable enough, given today's anti-establishment mood. It also happens to be wrong.
The attacks on the foreign policy establishment — the bipartisan group of experts that populate the U.S. government and think tanks and other nongovernmental institutions — started during the Barack Obama years. In response to criticism of Obama's Middle East policy, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes derided the establishment as “the blob,” a homogenous, unthinking repository of conventional wisdom.
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