a systemic crisis is not reducible to the importance of whoever happens to be in the office at the moment.
The reason I picked those particular people is because of Clinton's role in the removal of Qaddafi, Obama's role in the continued destabilization of Syria, and Merkel's public pledge to take in refugees (which exacerbated the degree to which it is a European crisis, instead of a Syrian or Africa crisis). "Whoever happens to be in the office at the moment" is a factor in many of these crises.
I have a feeling we're slowly slipping towards the conflict between the "impersonal forces" and "great people" views of history :-)
But I guess the question here is whether you want to discuss people or whether you want to discuss systems. Of course they are related and interdependent, but still. Going back to the source of this subthread, I find thinking about tensions between "rebels" and "nomenklatura" in US political parties to be moderately interesting (especially in the context of how they deal with the need to overpromise during the campaign). I find Donald Trump to be very uninteresting. YMMV, of course.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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