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The macabre American pandemonium of the past few days has been utterly riveting.

The streets of Washington choked with hundreds of thousands of protesters. The riots. The goofy pink hats. The inauguration and the weirdos in senior positions with the new administration explaining away their most transparently outrageous lies as “alternative facts.” And President Donald Trump himself, barking outlandishly paranoid orders like he’s tripping on some seriously wicked hallucinogen.

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The sheer carnival mayhem of it all has been impossible to ignore.

During the eight years that led up to this, Barack Obama’s presidency was so suave and so stylish that it was almost possible to imagine that the American abdication from the world was not happening, that it was just some people talking. That the United States was not retreating from the Greater Middle East. That the “reset” with Russia did not end up in a humiliating restoration of the Kremlin’s lost powers. That Obama’s trade “pivot” to Asia did not end in catastrophe.