It’s almost quaint to recall the extent to which the ossified foreign policy establishment convinced itself that Javier Milei was destined to be a spectacular failure. Some of the more metacognitive members of this crowd have since recanted, albeit without examining the faulty assumptions that fueled their confident pessimism. Their haughtiness, while not excusable, is understandable. After all, even the architects of the successful anti-inflation policies Milei promised to pursue in office have turned against their own records.
At the time of his election to Argentina’s presidency, Milei’s thoughtless critics applied a chauvinistic heuristic to their analysis of his program: He’s anti-socialist, therefore he must be a nationalist populist, a la Donald Trump. Dumb does not begin to describe this reflex, but it continues to be applied to right-of-center leaders abroad — from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to Taiwan’s Terry Gou.
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