It turns out that the smart diplomats and strategery buffs in the White House have taken another look at the situation in Syria and reached a new conclusion: that Assad isn’t going anywhere after all. The Syrian civil war is going to drag murderously on into the indefinite future, jihadi groups will fester and multiply in the heart of the Middle East, and America is fine with that.

We note in passing that we are yet again glad for America’s sake that President Obama isn’t a Republican. If President Bush had let Detroit go bankrupt in the same week he handed Iran and Russia a major diplomatic victory, the press hysteria would be overwhelming. The cold hearted racist who was criminally indifferent to black suffering at home would also be branded as a failed Machiavelli abroad: someone whose policies were as evil and cold hearted as the most cynical of realists but also as inept and ineffective as the most feckless of idealists.

Fortunately, the President is a liberal Democrat of sorts, and so, even as the fashionable but inconsequential left turns vituperatively against him and the establishment whispers its increasing doubts behind closed doors, we are spared the national humiliation of an intellectual and journalistic establishment openly at war with our political leaders. That is fine by us; press firestorms don’t often contribute to good policy formation….

Fortunately, for most of our history, America’s key advantages have had little to do with the quality of our national leadership or the intellectual brilliance of our foreign policy. As foreign policy thinkers and managers, American politicians and mandarins have historically not often been better than their peers and rivals abroad, and more often we have been outgunned and outclassed by nimbler and smarter thinkers overseas. What saves America’s bacon time and again is the dynamism of our economy, the strength of our political union, and in the last analysis the sacrificial patriotism of the American people.