The next presidential election is more than a year away and no fewer than 11 aspirants have announced that they are running, with another eight labeled “certain” or “likely” to run. All are now out there trying to tell their stories and separate themselves from the pack, but it is Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren who is first out of the gates with a formal foreign policy.

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Warren’s meaty article in Foreign Affairs is worth paying attention to, not so much because she is saying anything that others won’t. I imagine in fact that she is saying what all the Democrats will: end perpetual war, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, “a foreign policy that works for all Americans”.

And I understand as well that the purpose of these articles is to cover a lot of ground and not be too far off the beaten path, perhaps to say something to appease the experts and the news media, but not to write some treatise that is set in stone.

Still I have very bad news for Warren: she will get none of it. And what is more, in laying blame at Donald Trump’s door, certainly red meat for her party loyalists, Warren doggedly misses why Trump was elected, and why under him, things have not changed and gotten worse.

The United States, Warren says, has embarked on “a series of seemingly endless wars, engaging in conflicts with mistaken or uncertain objectives and no obvious path to completion”. It’s fine rhetoric but the obvious path to completion is merely to end the wars. And yet the Bush White House couldn’t or didn’t want to. And Obama vacillated and expanded to the point where bombing and killing was being pursued in almost a dozen countries when he left office. And as for Trump? He’s done little and he’s been publicly admonished by his own secretary of defense when he decided he wanted to end just one of those conflicts.

But “the United States”? Really? Other than Afghanistan after 9/11 – and that’s all – “the United States” didn’t embark on these wars. The national security community did. The government. Overtly, covertly, with high hopes or unwarranted self-confidence, they got their way.

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Who is the real culprit then? It isn’t Warren’s “elites”, the corporation, or Trump. It is Washington and its ability, indeed even its self-appointed duty, to stand in the way of anything that it sees as not in its interest.

She may not think it, but Warren is merely genuflecting before this deep state, declaring her allegiance to a “muscular military” and calling for “strong yet pragmatic security policies”. She of course offers a laundry list of things that must be preserved or strengthened that’s non-military – from technological superiority to diplomacy to strong alliances. And she decries the military and civilian policymakers who “seem [in]capable of defining success”. But in her innocence as to why we are stuck in seemingly endless wars she also seems oblivious to the fact that she is already capitulating to the very forces that ensure that we can’t change anything.

Warren’s tour of the world – a Russia that is “belligerent and resurgent”, a China that has “weaponized” everything, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, “looming unrest in the western hemisphere” – seems intent on proving herself neither a dove nor naive. Along the way she wants to “face down antidemocratic forces around the world”, end terrorism and deal with the “challenges” of cyber-attacks.

Dealing with it all, she says, requires “more than a strong military”. And so she wants multilateral arms control, more investments in diplomacy, increased foreign aid to advance US interests, strong and large alliances where our partners pay their fair share. Oh and she’s for peace, which she describes as “preventing problems from morphing into costly wars” and “not policing the world”, which somehow she twists to make an innovation after two years of Trump.

Trump campaigned against policing the world, for America first, against this permanent government, this swamp, and in his two years in office they have squarely subordinated him to be in “command” of nothing. It is of course Trump’s fault in his shallowness. But Barack Obama also experienced this crowd, and the full force of being unable to change hardly anything.

The American people, Warren says, “have less faith in their government today than at any other time in modern US history”. There’s no danger in saying it; it’s provable by polls. She doesn’t elaborate or name the culprits behind the many national security misfortunes she identifies. And in that is presidential weakness of the worst kind.