The contrast between Bush and Trump?

I found an interesting article about the Bush legacy (centred around facilitating a soft landing for the Cold War) and what has come after.

Essentially, the argument goes that the post-war architecture served us very well during the cold war, but needed updating after it. Instead, much of the western leadership has been clinging to the vestiges of those institutions, rather than revising, reinventing or reinvigorating them.

Trump, although from the same generation of Bush, is oblivious to the origin or purpose of post-war institutions. That gives him the freedom to question them, which is good and long overdue.

On the other hand, he's so dumb, he can't ask the right questions, or provide useful answers. Which is bad.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/george-bush-and-our-world-order/

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MistyCee

Nice piece, and really nice to hear there are still conservatives out there.

I particularly liked this part:

[quote]

Conservatives in particular should see that the need for new institutions and orders does not mean starting over, or imagining the world has changed fundamentally. It means preserving the best of what has served us in the past and applying enduring principles to some novel realities. An applied conservatism requires us to attend carefully to the actual circumstances we are living in, and that’s what we in the West have done poorly since the end of the Cold War. And it requires us not to forget our principles, as Trump’s amoral circus act invites us to do, when we do recognize that the world demands something hard.

Nothing about this will be easy. But we are in the process of a hard landing that might force us to grapple with some of the challenges that George H.W. Bush’s impressively orchestrated soft landing allowed us to ignore.

That means, in part, that the coming years will need to be a time of institution-building and rebuilding, which—to put it very mildly—isn’t exactly what our political culture is good at right now. We’re going to need to hone and appreciate the qualities of genuine prudence (the definition of which is very far from caution), [b]and we’re going to need people who—like Bush—want to invest themselves in institutions as patient insiders and not just to build themselves up as angry outsiders.[/b]
[/quote]

(Emphasis added)