Trump is not merely an agent of international disorder. He’s the second agent of international disorder to be elected president of the United States in the past two decades. Even worse than handing the White House to someone as unfit as Trump is to have done so immediately after his predecessor spent two terms in office attempting to demonstrate to the world that the mistakes of his predecessor were a temporary hiccup.

By now our allies and adversaries alike have learned the lesson that the United States is thoroughly unreliable. We will work for years to accomplish a series of goals in multiple regions of the world and then in an instant turn 180 degrees in the opposition direction, blowing up all of those efforts without the least hesitation or forethought. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, many will be relieved that Trump is gone, but no one will be fooled into believing for a second time that America has righted itself. Everyone will know that 2024 and yet another potential reversal is just four short years away.

Some Democrats and members of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment will no doubt be tempted to blame this massive self-inflicted wound on “partisanship,” as if our dissociative behavior on the world stage is ultimately the fault of failing to listen more carefully and obediently to dispassionate experts. But to talk about our problems in these terms is to misdescribe them in a superficial way. We aren’t careening wildly from one president to another because of our partisanship. Our drastic partisan shifts on foreign policy are a function of our underlying cluelessness about what we want to do in the world, a fantastical overestimation of our capabilities, and a resolute inability to think seriously about trade-offs.