What Trump Got Right in Foreign Policy in 2017

There is a temptation, when a new presidential administration comes into office, for its members to assume everything the previous administration did was idiotic, and that a wiser course of action would have been to do the precise opposite. We saw this in 2017, for example, when President Trump and some of his aides had an almost pathological obsession with the former president’s team and policies. But the Obama administration, too, seemed overly eager to distinguish itself from the Bush administration in its early years.

The problem is that presidential administrations are almost always filled with talented, hard-working people, and it’s a mistake to reflexively jettison whatever it was they decided upon for policy. And so those of us who left the last administration—who have been all too ready to criticize this new one—should keep an open