Daily Inspiration Quote by James Reston

Foreign policy is where a nation’s ego goes to get humbled. Reston’s line works because it punctures the comforting fantasy that the world is a stage built for American preferences - and does it with a wry little shrug. “Devilish” isn’t just colorful; it suggests mischief, unpredictability, the sense that international events behave like a trickster: you can plan, posture, threaten, and still get outmaneuvered by weather, history, geography, or someone else’s domestic politics.

The joke is embedded in the repetition: “foreign affairs” are “foreign.” Reston treats the obvious as revelation, a classic journalist’s move that exposes how often leaders forget the obvious once power enters the room. The subtext is a critique of entitlement masquerading as strategy. “Our whim” is especially sharp: it doesn’t say “our interests” or “our security,” the respectable nouns of statecraft. It says whim - impulse, mood, the kind of casual desire that gets punished when you project it onto places with their own grievances, factions, and long memories.

Contextually, Reston wrote through the Cold War, an era when Washington was tempted to treat faraway countries as chessboards and coups as policy tools. His sentence reads like a memo from reality: sovereignty exists, culture resists, and blowback is not a moral metaphor but a logistical certainty. The line’s intent is restraint, but not pacifism - a reminder that competence in foreign affairs begins with accepting you don’t control the script.