Daily Inspiration Quote by James Reston

Foreign policy is the one arena where accountability goes to die on a calendar. Reston’s line lands because it’s both a shrug and an indictment: statesmen act now, take credit now, and retire long before the bill arrives. By insisting on a twenty-five-year lag, he’s puncturing the comforting myth that international decisions can be graded like quarterly earnings. The real scoreboard is demographic drift, regime entropy, the slow corrosion of alliances, the afterlife of a covert operation no one will officially admit happened.

The intent is pragmatic but pointed. Reston isn’t romanticizing patience; he’s warning that foreign policy is a high-stakes experiment conducted with delayed results and convenient amnesia. That delay creates perverse incentives. Leaders can sell a war as “stability” while the region is merely stunned into silence. They can brand a coup as “freedom” while the institutions needed for freedom are being hollowed out. In the short term, almost any intervention can be made to look like competence if you control the press conference and the timeline.

The subtext is also about journalism and the limits of the news cycle. Reston, writing from the vantage of Washington’s revolving door of officials, understood that narratives harden quickly, while consequences move slowly. A policy’s “success” is often a story we tell ourselves to justify sunk costs, then revisit decades later when the archive opens and the refugees, blowback, and new enemies are no longer theoretical.

It works because it’s brutally modest: not “never intervene,” not “always intervene,” just a reminder that history’s verdict arrives late, and rarely in the language politicians used to sell the opening act.