3. Pompeo can’t be happy.

Despite the all-hawk cast of characters in Trumpland, there are fissures. As my onetime boss Paul Glastris of the Washington Monthly explained to me over a decade ago about how to think about the foreign policy of the George W. Bush White House, “It isn’t hawk versus dove. It’s hawk versus whack job.” Mike Pompeo, the hawk, is pursuing terrible and deluded foreign policy all over the world, but, compared to Bolton, the whack job, he is the soul of diplomacy. Pompeo, for all his reservations, had been doing his homework and trying to lay the groundwork for non-failure with Pyongyang. One day, we’ll probably learn about how enraged Pompeo was over Bolton’s games. And he could not have enjoyed having to stonewall on questions about whether the United States had bothered to offer any other countries advance notice of this latest move. The disregard for the interests or position of South Korean President Moon Jae-in is jaw-dropping, even by Trump standards.

As for Bolton, he won’t last forever with Trump. Hawks reliably have a solution for problems, usually taking the form of a giant hammer, and that makes them appealing. But odds are he’ll take an accelerated path blazed by Dick Cheney as vice president. That road involves presenting the president with seductively simple solutions involving the use of force, the president being persuaded, disaster ensuing, and then getting sidelined. But before the sidelining comes the disaster.

4. Republicans used to be competent at foreign policy.

I know how unfair it is to note how different this dance has been from that of Mao Tse-tung and Richard Nixon in 1971 and 1972. It’s like comparing the Kirov Ballet to a wino yelling in traffic. But I’ll go there all the same, because we forget how Republicans used to be able to combine robust hawkishness with tact and homework, producing remarkable results.

The challenge of 1971 between Beijing and Washington was far harder. Beijing was belligerent, even in the face of U.S. overtures, and at one point came close to intercepting a U.S. spy plane off the Chinese coast, which would have put an end to any thaw. Even as it was, Nixon was vigorously prosecuting the war in Vietnam, fighting the side supported by Beijing. He was committed to guaranteeing the security of Taiwan, which Beijing was determined to retake. He was determined to undermine Marxist and Marxist-leaning regimes around the world, while Beijing was determined to support them and increase their number. China’s devotion to Maoism was near the peak of fanaticism.

Yet, united by a shared interest in containing Soviet power, China and the United States found a way to work things out. Henry Kissinger, as national security adviser, took secret trips and came up with creative language for communiqués in which the two nations resolved seemingly intractable differences. Nixon, for his part, sweated every detail of protocol and politeness, from how to handle a Chinese toast to how invitations should be worded. Knowing about how Premier Zhou Enlai had been snubbed in 1954, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake hands in Geneva, Nixon made sure to approach Zhou with his hand extended. There was never any chance Trump was going to do any homework or preparation of this sort. (“He doesn’t think he needs to,” a senior administration official helpfully explained to Time.) But Republicans in general seem increasingly indifferent to the idea that other countries might have legitimate interests or values of their own, even when they are out of sync with those of the United States.

The folly of the George W. Bush White House required the combination of a national security crisis, a fanatical vice president, and an ignorant president who was confident of carrying out the will of God. Such a combination of factors hasn’t yet hit the Trump White House, but we’re getting close. Worst of all is that Trump’s version of nationalism has increasingly come to mean nothing but pathological self-interest. An obsessive focus on No. 1 is defensible for countries that mind their own business, in the manner of Japan, but not for countries that seem determined to mind the business of all the world. Our allies and competitors are increasingly looking for ways to work around the United States, or contain it, and it’s hard to blame them. That isn’t solely the fault of Trump. His predecessors bequeathed him with plenty of folly. But he seems determined to outdo them all.