Reverting to the Historical Mean
Trump's foreign policy misadventures point the way toward a future a lot like the past
A Story in Six Quotations
“Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
—Max Boot, The Weekly Standard, October 2001
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
—Michael Ledeen’s foreign policy “doctrine,” as quoted by Jonah Goldberg, April 2002
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’… ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
—Ron Suskind in a 2004 essay for The New York Times Magazine, quoting an anonymous senior adviser to President George W. Bush, interviewed in the latter half of 2002
“Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories (despite hav[ing] already made them far wealthier and more successful). The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to these newcomers and their families not only the full franchise but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry. The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.”
—Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy justifying the Trump administration’s military intervention in Venezuela, January 4, 2026
“I’m as reflexively non-interventionist as anyone can possibly be, but Venezuela appears to be a resounding victory and one of the most brilliant military operations in American history. As an unapologetic American Chauvinist, I want America to rule over this hemisphere and exert its power for the good of our people. If some shitty little tinpot third world dictator is harming our country or interfering with our national interests, we should do exactly what Trump did to Maduro. Why not? ‘International law’ is fake and gay. The only international law is that big and powerful countries get to do what they want. It has been that way since the dawn of civilization. It will always be that way. And we are the most powerful country on the planet. It’s about time that we start acting like it.”
—Matt Walsh, a right-wing “influencer” with four million followers on Twitter/X, offering his own justification for the Trump administration’s military intervention in Venezuela, January 4, 2026
“Day 4 of 2026 and Trump has already threatened military action/annexation/takeover against:
Canada
Colombia
Cuba
Greenland
Iran
Mexico
Venezuela”—Susan Glasser, staff writer for The New Yorker, January 4, 2026
Who or What Is the Outlier?
I chose to begin my first post of 2026 with these six quotations because I think they convey something important about the geopolitical reality we now inhabit. It’s a reality profoundly different than the one we confronted just a few years ago—but also a reality with very deep roots in human and American history. Consider this post an extension of previous writings in which I’ve attempted to think through the ramifications of treating the Cold War and its generation-long aftermath as an outlier era that has now come to a definitive close.
An awful lot of commentary about Donald Trump, both domestically and in terms of foreign policy, begins and never departs from the assumption that he is the outlier the rest of us merely need to endure until he departs the scene, allowing reality to revert to its normal contours. I think this is quite wrong. After ten years, I’m frankly sick of hearing versions of “this isn’t normal,” along with the insinuation that any way of looking at current events that doesn’t begin and end with disgust (or, worse, blame the decisive influence of some conveniently external evil demon) is somehow a betrayal of all good things or even amounts to a tacit endorsement of Trump’s actions.
It’s much closer to the truth to say that Trump is helping to topple an order that barely emerged in the first place and was never fully embraced by many millions of Americans. This isn’t a defense of what Trump is doing, let alone of how he’s doing it. But it is a plea to do a better job of assimilating him, and those who support him, into our understanding of the past and present. He is us—or rather, some important, neglected aspect of us that can’t just be quarantined and expelled from the body politic so we can revert to the noble project of completing construction of the liberal international order.
