And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.

Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class.  Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage.

The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of "rent-a-mobs" of political protestors.

Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become "a  muscular arm of foreign governments' lobbying in Washington," the New York Times reported in 2015. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatari government, would devote itself to "reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones."