Senator Bob Corker went to Trump Tower today to pay court to the new leader of his party and the meeting engendered some understandable speculation from political observers. Was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under consideration for the Republican vice presidential nomination? Is he a potential secretary of state in a Trump administration? We don’t know the answer to those questions, but it is reasonable to infer from Trump’s apparent comfort with Corker that either post is a possibility for the Tennessee senator. Whether or not Corker gets tapped for veep or the State Department, his influence raises some interesting questions about the future of American foreign policy in a putative Trump administration.

On its face, Trump making nice with a pillar of the Republican establishment in the Senate makes sense. If Trump is looking, as he says he is, for someone who knows how Congress works and can deal with the powers that be, Corker was always going to be among those looked at as being able to fill the bill. He is a generally considered a moderate Republican with a good relationship with most of his colleagues and somebody who works well with Democrats.