Some officials are nostalgia for Cold War diplomacy. Don’t buy it.

News Snapshot:

An article by Philip Zelikow in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, titled “The Atrophy of American Statecraft,” argues that the U.S. is having a hard time dealing with all the problems in the world because our government no longer has “the breadth or depth of competence”—the “capabilities and know-how”—that it once did. There may be something to this. Today’s diplomats, shrewd and talented as many of them are, couldn’t honestly claim peerage with the likes of George Kennan, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, or the other eminences who shaped the frameworks and crafted the policies that kept the West free...