Russia, China reject UN move to rebuke Syrian president

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48. Unlike Bush in Iraq, we can't attribute it to either lack of intellect or intelligence at the top.

So, the flaws in the policy have to be rooted in something else, something more systemic. Let's look at the range of models of understanding and possibilities suggested by them:

* Political Choice Theory - Policy inertia: Aggressive policies of intervention and containment that may have been effective two or three decades ago are still operative, but no longer work because of the degradation of US power and influence.
* Interest Group Theory - Domestic political causes: political gridlock and poor policy choices can often be attributed to disproportionate influence by special interests that dominate political coalitions.
* Schumpeter's Creative Destruction Theory of Political Economics - Catastrophic failure for the US, in general, is a potential gain for others. System maintains its equilibrium; success or failure is not a normative matter, but of measurable global aggregates of welfare. Other markets and regions are more efficient producers of wealth, so this is a net positive transfer.
* Imperialism Theory - Conflict Imperative: the US system since World War Two is essentially based in permanent warfare. The federal government and national economy cannot survive without continuous foreign conflict, intervention, and military spending. Not an outcomes based system, but one with its own internal imperative to initiate wars, even ones that we will likely lose according to a rational cost-benefits analysis.