If you've ever had aspirations to become secretary of state, reconsider. Out of all the top spots in US government, it sounds like the most impossible gig to tackle, writes Thomas Friedman for New York Times, mainly because "the job of running US foreign policy is far, far harder than most Americans have ever spent time considering." Friedman notes that tackling America's nondomestic issues is a super-tough one, "in an age when you have to manage superpowers, supercorporations, superempowered individuals and networks, superstorms, superfailing states, and superintelligence—all intermingling with one another, creating an incredibly complex web of problems to untangle to get anything done."
For context, he cites what onetime Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had to do in the early '70s to get Israel, Egypt, and Syria to work on their issues, a relatively easy game of "tic-tac-toe" won simply by contacting those three heads of state. Today, that part of the world, with Antony Blinken now in the US secretary of state role, has changed "from a region of solid nation-states to one increasingly made of failed states, zombie states, and superempowered angry men armed with precision rockets" (for example, Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis, etc.). In other words: "Goodbye, tic-tac-toe. Today, getting the interests of all these entities aligned at once to secure a ceasefire in Gaza is as easy as getting all the same colors lined up on one side of a Rubik's Cube." More here from Friedman, who also lays out the pros and cons of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in wrangling such a complex world. (More foreign policy stories.)
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