There are few phrases as fundamental to US politics as foreign policy. It shapes the balance of power between branches of government. It separates a special class of public servants. And it commands sober respect from both sides of the partisan aisle.
Indeed, in American politics, “foreign policy” is a phrase used so unthinkingly that it may be strange to point out what it really is: a paradigm first developed to protect the English monarchy, imported across the Atlantic by our nation’s founders, stretched to breaking point by over two centuries of geopolitical change, and broken – at last – by the presidency of Donald Trump.