After two years of war, the remaining hostages held by Hamas are headed home following a landmark peace deal negotiated by the Trump administration. That announcement was met by widespread approval intermixed with expected and transparent silence from the "ceasefire now" crowd.
It wasn't just Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Bernie Sanders who ended up with egg on their faces, though. That honor was spread throughout the entirely of the so-called foreign policy establishment. Who could forget Joe Biden repeatedly being described as the most experienced foreign policy president in history? How terrible that experience was didn't seem to matter to anyone proclaiming his supposed invaluable wisdom, and on the way out the door, the former president was still singing his own praises.
BIDEN: "Today, I can report to the American people our adversaries are weaker than they were when we came into this job four years ago!"
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 13, 2025
He's a delusional, dangerous liar. pic.twitter.com/qYNHiU1LAR
For five decades, Biden faceplanted time and again on the international stage, stretching all the way back to his time as a junior senator. From his continual misread of the Middle East to his enablement of Russia, there are no foreign policy accomplishments on his record. But in Washington, credentials have long overshadowed reality. If one had the right pieces of paper on the wall or held political office for long enough, they were bestowed the title of "expert" without any consideration for what that "expertise" had produced.
In the case of Biden, it was decades of death and destruction, but he was hardly alone. Foreign policy had long ago morphed into a bipartisan conflagration of failure, and the Middle East stood at the center of that of that record. "Experts" from both sides rushed to their CNN hits to arrogantly tout the status quo. Slapped with titles like "national security analyst," they insisted that Iran must be appeased, that the Palestinians must be given a state, and that the Arab nations would never make peace with Israel.
Then came Donald Trump, whose administration decided that maybe trying something different was in order. What followed was mockery. In January of 2020, The Washington Post published a piece entitled, "I have just read 25 books and am here to perform your open heart surgery." It was meant to make fun of Jared Kushner, who had taken the lead in Middle East relations for Trump.
Well, who's laughing now?
They all made fun of Jared Kushner, but he has now secured two major Middle East peace deals where all his predecessors failed.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) October 10, 2025
What does that say about those predecessors and their supposed “expertise,” along with a press who gargles credentials while ignoring results? pic.twitter.com/u37SEdBCbg
What does it say about our foreign policy establishment and all it's much ballyhooed experience that a hedgefund manager who read a few books stepped in and did what they said was impossible, both regarding getting all the hostages home without significant Israeli concessions and the success of the Abraham Accords? As the quip goes, sometimes you can just do things, and all the finger-wagging in the world adds up to nothing in the face of those accomplishments.
Those who destroyed Libya and Syria while elevating Iran have no credibility left, and those are just their most recent disasters. Think-tank tenures and being "in the room" for bad decisions doesn't make someone good at foreign policy. It just makes them good at monetizing it. The page is turning, though, and the old foreign policy establishment is in shambles.
Tom Nichols, one of the most ridiculous, insidious members of the old guard wrote a book called, "The Death of Expertise." He meant it as a criticism of new-school thought, deriding the dismissal of "established knowledge" during the rise of Trump. As parodic as that critique turned out to be, I'll give Nichols this. His title turned out to be technically true. "Expertise" has died, and the experts killed it.
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