Symptom: "Kerry has been stumbling & bloviating from one crisis to the next, one debacle to another, surrounded by the well-crafted imagery of diplomatic effectiveness"

"... Whatever his failings, John Kerry is only a symptom of Washington's lack of a coherent foreign policy or sense of mission. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been adrift, as big and dangerous as an iceberg but something closer to the Titanic. President Bush, the father, and president Clinton, the husband, had at least some sense of when not to overdo it. They kept their foreign interventions to relatively neat packages, perhaps recognizing that they had ever less idea what the script was anymore. 
Waking up on that clear morning of September 12, 2001, the administration of Bush, the son, substituted a crude lashing out and an urge for total domination of the Greater Middle East, and ultimately the planet, for foreign policy. Without hesitation, it claimed the world as its battlefield and then deployed the Army, the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force, growing Special Operations forces, paramilitarized intelligence outfits, and drone technology to make it so. They proved to be good killers, but someone seemed to forget that war is politics by other means. Without a thought-out political strategy behind it, war is simply violent chaos unleashed...., ........, 
The American Century might be said to have lasted from August 1945 until September 2001, a relatively short span of 56 years. (RIP) John Kerry's frantic bumbling did not create the present situation; it merely added mirth to the funeral preparations"