Returning to the gold standard isn't going to happen, and it's a bad idea anyway. Returning to the gold standard basically means giving up on the idea of monetary policy - that is, adjusting the currency supply to change the economy. It's actually rather more brave than that: rather than no monetary policy under the gold standard (how it's sometimes portrayed by adherents), the gold standard has uncontrolled monetary policy instead, where the supply of currency will fluctuate not based on what the Federal Reserve does, but via whether new gold deposits are found in Africa and how cheap the rights are.
Basically, the advantage to the gold standard is that it theoretically stops psychotic governments from shooting themselves in the foot with hyper-inflation. I say theoretically because they can just quietly weaken the gold standard instead - from AD 100 - 400 or so, watch the percentage of gold in Roman coins steadily decrease, for example. (Which was not all bad, that was how one did monetary policy in the old days.) The disadvantage is that you have to think that monetary policy is *powerless* rather than "bad," because the money supply is now (theoretically) uncontrolled by anyone and will just wander whatever direction it wants, even if said direction is inconvenient. And of course if monetary policy is powerless, then there's no particular difference between gold & fiat currency anyway.
(The value of the dollar had just slid to below 1/1,200th of an ounce of gold; it has since plunged to below 1/1,600th of an ounce.)
Funniest line of the article, FWIW. This means that gold has become relatively more dear. Buy gold then? Have a cookie. But plenty of other products have become cheaper, so does this say anything about the "plunging" dollar? If only there was some way of measuring this that combined food, oil, technology, etc... oh wait there is. Purchasing power parity or one of the many other methods we have of measuring inflation all say that inflation has not been an issue in the past 20 years or so.
At its heart, the appeal of the gold standard is based on an irrational totemism of "sound money" as that article exemplifies. What the hell is sound money? Does it mean non-inflationary money? Does it merely mean valuable money? We could pull the trick that various nations caught in hyper-inflation do and just shave a 0 off everything if that's the goal. Wow, a dollar is now worth ten times as much. Money is an abstract medium of exchange whose value is inherently tied to the rest of the economy around it. A million dollars on a desert island will do you no good. Ergo it should be treated as such, and not as some physical good with inherent value. (For all that in antiquity, obviously using gold had its own advantages in terms of portability between countries in an era before foreign exchange markets.)
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Also, looking up: Pretty much the only way to get foreign policy *experience* is to be vice president. Which many presidents have done, in fairness. Just being a politician hopefully implies a certain level of international competence & awareness. Clinton may have "only" been Governor of Arkansas and he was hit for lack of foreign policy chops by Bush in 92, but he was a Rhodes Scholar who spent time in the UK and kept abreast of international politics. Unlike a certain Alaska governor.
