While waiting for a President serious about the world, however, there is much that the United States can and should do to prepare to address the new world disorder that President Obama will leave to his successor. And the first thing that can and should be done involves serious thought. How did the post-Cold War order crumble so rapidly? Why did we not see these things coming? What did the Clinton and Bush administrations get right, and what did they get wrong, in terms of post-Cold War strategy and tactics?

It would be expecting too much to hope that the Democratic Party and its 2016 presidential candidate might offer serious answers to these serious questions. For the Democrats have become the Republicans of the 1920s and 1930s: the party whose theme song is "Make the world go away". Unlike those interwar Republican isolationists, however, and unlike the isolationist fringe in the contemporary Republican Party represented by Senator Rand Paul, the 21st-century Democrats don't believe that a nasty, brutish and violent world will corrupt a pristine America; the new isolationists believe that America is the cause of many of the world's problems, which will resolve themselves if left alone. Further planks in that neo-isolationist platform include the following notions, which, taken together as a strategic worldview, help explain a lot of what often seems inexplicable about Obama administration foreign policy:

• Conflict is an aberration, not the normal condition of international affairs in a world of competing interests and ideals.
• Peace is a state of mind that can be willed into being, not the achievement of a balance of power in service to accepted (and enforced) norms of international behaviour.
• The American use of armed force is almost always a bad idea and reflects a failure of imagination and will on the part of US policymakers.
• The present state system ought to be replaced by some form of international governance, in which multilateral and international bodies take the leading roles.
• America's principal responsibility in the world is to advance the construction of this multilaterally organised world order, not to defend and advance the interests of the United States and the West.
• With the Cold War over, there is no power, group of powers, or ideology that poses a grave threat to the United States and the West.
• American is not indispensable, for there is nothing morally or politically distinctive, much less special (or, heaven forfend, "exceptional") about the American experiment in ordered liberty. So there is no distinctively American approach to world affairs and the US ought not seek any distinctive role in the world politics of the 21st century.

As for the Republicans, their campaign consultants (who managed to seize defeat from the jaws of a very attainable victory in 2012) will almost certainly want to run the 2016 presidential campaign as yet another referendum on the economic and other domestic failures of the Obama administration, including the fiasco of Obamacare. But Obama, Kerry & Co will likely leave the world in such tough shape that a serious Republican candidate will have to propose a grown-up foreign policy, not only to heighten the contrast with the Democrats but to prepare the country (and the West) for the long, hard road that must be trod, in order to escape the slough of disorder in which Obama will have left world politics.