Margaret Chan was quite taken by what she saw on her visit to Pyongyang in 2010. North Koreans had "something which most other developing countries would envy," she noted: a first-rate medical system with plenty of doctors and nurses. Not only that, there were no obesity problems, she enthused, discussing a country with chronic food shortages where a famine in the mid-1990s had killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The musings of a cretinous fellow traveler or a naïve adventure tourist? No, this bizarre apologia for the world's most repressive dictatorship was delivered by the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), a U.N. agency with an annual budget of around $4 billion.

Occasionally you take a moment to look up from the day-to-day or hour-to-hour or tweet-to-tweet turmoil of the Trump presidency. You want a reprieve from the constant and enervating melodrama of the Trump era. You try to take a longer view.

But when you do, what you find are not answers but questions.

In a cover story in this magazine almost a decade ago, the late Dean Barnett hailed "the 9/11 generation" and held out the hope—nay, the expectation—that they would contribute more to the nation than their parents, the baby boomers:

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.
Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers—those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation—took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as

Rolling out the Trump administration's formal 2018 budget, acting Pentagon comptroller John Roth confessed that Defense secretary James Mattis "hasn't spent one moment" looking beyond the coming budget year. But even a cursory glance at the plan makes one wonder whether he paid much attention to this year, either.

Once again, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney seems to have pulled a fast one on the Pentagon. From the draft "skinny" budget outline produced in March, it was already apparent that there would be no Trump defense buildup.

On April 30, 2012, Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser made a bold prediction: It was possible to envision a world in which al Qaeda's central leadership would "no longer [be] relevant" to the United States and the organization itself would be eliminated. "If the decade before 9/11 was the time of al Qaeda's rise, and the decade after 9/11 was the time of its decline, then I believe this decade will be the one that sees its demise," boasted John Brennan.

This wasn't an analytical assessment. It was a political claim, coming just six months before the 2012 election, at the beginning of the Obama administration's coordinated public relations campaign to portray al Qaeda as "on the run.

Like millions of American men, I spent a good number of weeknights in my youth donning a goofy uniform and heading off to church. The meetings all began the same way—we would rise from our folding chairs, make an odd gesture with our hands, and say, "On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight."

The decision this spring of the Mormon church to pull 185,000 older teens out of the Boy Scouts suggests that this quintessential American rite of passage has a very uncertain future. Anyone familiar with the Mormon church and the Boy Scouts will know how unthinkable this move

This week Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. It was an important move, and one that President Donald Trump made unavoidable with his erratic and irresponsible behavior over the past fortnight.

It all began on May 9 when Trump fired FBI director James Comey. For two days, the White House misled the American public about how and why this dismissal took place. The White House emphasized Comey's handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton's email server, which Rosenstein had reviewed and criticized in a memorandum for his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The attorney general, in turn, had recommended a change of leadership at the FBI.

The fish, as they say, rots from the head first. And Donald J. Trump is the head of the executive branch. It's not that the U.S. government isn't beset by innumerable problems and systemic dysfunction. But in the here and now, Donald Trump is the problem. The president is the dysfunction.

And so, in the midst of the fevered speculation about the meaning and implications of what is happening in the capital of one of the greatest and most powerful nations in the history of the world, let's not lose focus.

Donald Trump is an embarrassment. It would be better for the country if he were president for at most one term. It would be desirable that his manner of governing go down in history as an aberration; that his form of conservatism be judged a detour from the broad path of a mostly praiseworthy movement; and that his type of Republicanism be seen as a cul-de-sac from which the GOP finds an honorable exit.

But he is our president and presumably will be our president for the next three and a half years. Many individuals we admire have joined his administration, or have stayed on since his taking over the reins of the executive. They therefore work, if only at times willy-nilly and at very different degrees of remove, at his

President Donald Trump fired James Comey just as the FBI director moved to expand and intensify the bureau's counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the possible collusion of Trump advisers in those efforts.

That development alone ought to give pause to Republicans inclined to go to the barricades for the president. But there's more. The White House's after-the-fact explanations of the Comey firing were inconsistent and internally contradictory—and even, at times, demonstrably untrue.

"It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is." —Leo Strauss

It is safer to try to understand the current state of American politics in light of what has gone before—and, we trust, in light of what will come after—than to understand America's past and future in light of the present moment. It's safer to try to understand Donald Trump in light of the American political tradition than to view American politics reflected via the funhouse mirror of Trumpism.

He should’ve stuck with "ridiculous." That was the word President Trump used in late April to describe the "first 100 days" standard by which new commanders in chief are judged for their productivity. Trump himself cited the timeline before the election in his Contract with the American Voter, a "100-day action plan to Make America Great Again"—as realistic as a one-day push to build Rome. He's learned since that legislating is a slog and externalities like foreign affairs and Congress's Russia probe don't politely yield to a domestic policy wish list. Acknowledging as much—"No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days .  .  .

He should’ve stuck with "ridiculous." That was the word President Trump used in late April to describe the "first 100 days" standard by which new commanders in chief are judged for their productivity. Trump himself cited the timeline before the election in his Contract with the American Voter, a "100-day action plan to Make America Great Again"—as realistic as a one-day push to build Rome. He's learned since that legislating is a slog and externalities like foreign affairs and Congress's Russia probe don't politely yield to a domestic policy wish list. Acknowledging as much—"No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days .  .  .

Regrets—we've all had a few. L'esprit de l'escalier—that wonderful line coming to mind a moment too late—is a common annoyance after failed dates and dud job interviews; dented fenders and bum shoulders attest to avoidable failures of depth perception and misjudged forays into backyard football games.

When it comes to the development of nuclear weapons by rogue states, however, regrets become rather more profound.

Consider the apparently intractable problem of North Korea's weapons program. Pyongyang began surreptitiously developing nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s, the totalitarian state had announced its intention to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a bold

There were plenty of worries that President Trump’s "America First" campaigning signaled a further retreat of American power and leadership abroad—a worry not mitigated either by his Inaugural Address or his speech before Congress, in which foreign and defense policy were given short shrift. Those concerns have not completely gone away, given the uncertainty over how this White House goes about making foreign and defense decisions and over who exactly will end up filling the many vacant policy positions at State, Defense, and the National Security Council.

But adversaries and events have a way of forcing a president's hand.

As we approach the 100-day mark of the Donald Trump presidency, it is instructive to recall the almost 100 months during which Barack Obama discharged the responsibilities of that high office. While there are reasons to be concerned about President Trump (and reasons to be encouraged, such as the presence of individuals like National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis), it is obviously far too soon to render judgment on Trump's foreign policy.

But it is not too soon to judge President Obama's. That judgment is increasingly hard to contest: The Obama years have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Severely wanting.

By the end of Obama's presidency, the U.S.

One of the most tedious aspects of our politics is partisan battles over legislative procedure. To hear each side tell it, the opposition never hesitates to employ unprecedented tactics to further narrow political goals at great cost to the republic. Such arguments are almost always disingenuous. The two parties view legislative process as little more than a means to an end, and both can be counted on to do whatever they think they can get away with.

So it goes with the judicial filibuster, which was “nuked" (in the contemporary parlance) by Senate Republicans to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

One of the most tedious aspects of our politics is partisan battles over legislative procedure. To hear each side tell it, the opposition never hesitates to employ unprecedented tactics to further narrow political goals at great cost to the republic. Such arguments are almost always disingenuous. The two parties view legislative process as little more than a means to an end, and both can be counted on to do whatever they think they can get away with.

So it goes with the judicial filibuster, which was “nuked" (in the contemporary parlance) by Senate Republicans to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

President Donald Trump certainly did his part in setting the table for the current state of public discourse. Make what you will of his agenda: His successful campaign has transformed the substance of political speech. This is an era when offhand vulgarity counts as straight talk; when “bomb the s— out of" ISIS becomes a policy plank; when George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" might as well be a consultant's handbook, for not only can you now say them on the stump, you are likely to lead the evening newscasts as a result. This is not about what was said in some bus on a Hollywood set 12 years ago.

"In any election,” Tom Coburn often says, “you should vote for the candidate who will give up the most if they win.” All things being equal, we should prefer politicians who have accomplished something in their lives beyond government work—and who are willing to sacrifice it, at least temporarily, to serve the country at a cost to their convenience and comfort. During his 6 years in the House of Representatives and 10 more in the Senate, Coburn has embodied his own principle.

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!
—"Pippa's Song," Robert Browning, 1841

As momentous events like the NCAA basketball finals and Major League Baseball's opening day remind us: It's spring. Which, as bards through the centuries have instructed us, is a good thing. Who are we to quarrel with the poetic wisdom of the ages?

So we welcome spring 2017. And the first thing to note is that, in many respects, all remains well.

No politician is bigger than the game. This is not a lesson unique to President Donald Trump, though he doubtless has a new appreciation for how entrenched Washington is in its ways. But it may be a revelation to some of the millions who voted for him, energized by a pledge that this would finally be the guy to shake up the system. In the last two months, Trump has been taking the country on a wild ride. But the roller coaster is still in the same amusement park.

Consider:

The infighting that has inhibited the congressional GOP in recent years has remained and perhaps been exacerbated.