Daily Inspiration Quote by Juan Cole

“Administering another country” is a deliberately antiseptic phrase, the kind you’d find in a policy memo where invasion is rebranded as management. Juan Cole’s intent is to puncture that managerial fantasy with a single, dry warning: empire doesn’t behave like a spreadsheet. The line works because it sounds understated while smuggling in a heavy accusation. “Tricky” is doing the work of a paragraph, hinting at resistance, humiliation, insurgency, corruption, culture clashes, and the moral blowback that follows when outsiders presume they can run a society like a provincial office.

Cole, as an educator and public intellectual, is speaking from the long shadow of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and the broader post-9/11 era, when “nation-building” became a technocratic euphemism for open-ended occupation. His subtext is less “foreign policy is hard” than “foreign policy is arrogant.” The wording positions the administrator as the problem: it assumes permission, competence, and legitimacy before any of those have been earned. That’s the trap Cole wants the reader to notice.

The quote also carries a historian’s sense of repetition. Great powers keep rediscovering the same lesson, then promptly misfile it under “unexpected complications.” By choosing calm, almost bureaucratic language, Cole mirrors the tone of the institutions he’s critiquing, then lets the sentence quietly indict them: if it’s “always” tricky, the real mystery is why leaders keep treating it as routine.