Either way, the stakes remind me of a question I once asked [Lindsey] Graham on a long flight over Central Asia. At what point in his career, I wondered, had he gathered the boldness to assert himself so overtly in foreign policy?
“When I was first elected to the House,” he recalled, “I looked for the they. They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they.” After that, he went on, “I went to the Senate. But there was still no they. And then I started to get invited to the White House, and to closed-door briefings, and to meetings with top officials. No they.” “What I finally realized,” he concluded, “is that there is no they. There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the f*ck we’re doing.”