Politics & Power Quote by Pat Buchanan

The line lands like a slap at America’s self-mythology: the frontier gunman who strides into town, pins on a badge, and starts dispensing order with a cool hand and a quicker draw. By invoking Wyatt Earp, Buchanan isn’t just arguing against intervention; he’s ridiculing the swagger that often accompanies it. The metaphor is doing double duty: it frames U.S. power as both extralegal (self-deputized) and theatrical (a legend polished by Hollywood), hinting that what gets sold as principled leadership can look, from the outside, like vigilantism with better press.

“Deputized” is the knife twist. Authority, in a democratic imagination, is supposed to be granted - by voters at home, by allies abroad, by international law, by some recognizable mandate. Buchanan’s phrasing implies the mandate doesn’t exist, or has been assumed by habit. The subtext is an attack on the moral alibi of American exceptionalism: if you believe you were chosen to police the world, you stop noticing when your policing looks like domination.

Context matters because Buchanan’s career is essentially a long argument with post-World War II internationalism, sharpened in the eras when “leader of the free world” became a near-reflexive justification for deploying force - from the Cold War’s proxy battles to the post-1991 unipolar moment and, later, the War on Terror. The quote is designed to puncture the bipartisan tendency to treat global crises as auditions for American resolve. It’s less a plea for innocence than a demand for limits: power should be accountable, and restraint should count as patriotism, not retreat.