From a comment posted on the website elaph.com in March by the “digital outreach team” of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs. The team, which consists of two Arabic-language analysts and a foreign-services officer, regularly posts comments on Arabic websites that are considered official statements by the State Department. 

When I was in college, an English literature professor assigned Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” The point of this poem is that discovering new paths is useful because well-traveled trails will lead to the same old place. Although it was written in a different era,…