Where have all the leaders gone?

Foreign-policy experts and diplomats who have absorbed these globalist assumptions are woefully unprepared to face the complex geopolitical challenges that now confront them. In part, they are the prisoners of the narrow technocratic outlook they adopted during their university years. However, the Western foreign-policy establishment is not just poorly trained and educated. Along with other members of the ruling elite, foreign-policy elites have also embraced a cosmopolitan outlook that has encouraged them to become detached from their nation.

Indeed, it is not only geopolitics that has become a dirty word in these circles. Many officials working for the US State Department or the British Foreign Office regard the very concept of the national interest as outdated and populist. From their standpoint, the nation has become morally irrelevant. These officials are embarrassed by any manifestation of patriotism. They are far more comfortable with, say, combatting human trafficking, fighting global poverty or promoting the human rights of sexual minorities in the Middle East than with upholding the interests of their own nations. As far as they are concerned, ‘global solidarity’, multilateralism and international law are morally superior to what they see as the narrow-minded and selfish goal of pursuing national interests.

In effect, the foreign-policy elites of the West no longer even understand the interests of the nations they are supposed to be serving. This has made them geopolitically illiterate. And, as a result, Western foreign policy lacks strategic clarity. It responds to global events rather than trying to shape them.