The Establishment will remain.

U.S. diplomat based in Constantinople once wrote of a visit made to the embassy there in 1906 by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, according to the diplomat, appeared unacquainted with the region and upon learning the next leg of his journey was to the Balkans, replied, “What are the Balkans?”

We are a long way from that now. Yet from the vantage point of 2024, Bryan’s innocence seems both quaint and preferable to what we have now—especially after four years of the worst kind of activist American foreign policy under Joe Biden. Today, the U.S. is saddled with a foreign policy establishment imbued with a kind missionary zeal to spread the most current iteration of what passes for American “values” all over the world. And when it isn’t busy doing that it is killing people. Lots of people. What allows for such a state of affairs to continue?

The answer lies in the nature of the foreign policy establishment.  As the English journalist Henry Fairlie noted some 70 years ago, the establishment,

is not those people who hold and exercise power as such. It is the people who create and sustain the climate of assumption and opinion within which power is exercised by those who do hold it by election or appointment.

As we approach next Tuesday’s election, it is worth recalling the words of the great revisionist historian William Appleman Williams on the matter. Williams warned against confusing the establishment with the government or state, 

for in doing that we remove ourselves from any consequential part in shaping our way of life. In the first place, we foster an illusion that electing or appointing different people will produce or lead to a change in the outlook of the Weltanschauung. But we are in reality changing the wrong people.

The only prediction that can be made with any certainty with regard to next Tuesday is that the foreign policy establishment will escape unscathed.