Source: WeChat Official Account "LaoShu Jizhe"
If Graham Greene were listening from the grave to President Trump’s speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, days ago, he’d probably wake up laughing. In his 1955 novel The Quiet American, the British author created an unforgettable character: Alden Pyle, a Harvard-educated, fresh-faced idealist posing as a U.S. economic attaché in Saigon—but secretly a CIA operative.
Pyle fanatically believed in York Harding’s “Third Force” theory, which advocated partnering with opposition groups in non-liberal democracies to overthrow “dictators” via assassination and rebellion. Fueled by the passion to liberate Vietnam from dictatorship and transform it into a free and democratic nation, Pyle orchestrated a series of assassinations in Saigon. In the end, however, his idealism yielded nothing but the loss of innocent Vietnamese lives—and ultimately his own.
Greene’s satire of Pyle was gentle but piercing: a clueless idealist, ignorant of Vietnam’s reality, doomed to crash into harsh truths. Pyle, of course, was a metaphor for America itself. No wonder Greene was once banned from the U.S.—even as The Quiet American became an important reference book in American political science courses.
On May 13, Trump’s Riyadh speech crowned Greene’s 70-year-old prophecy. In a landmark moment, the President declared the U.S. would no longer police whether other nations are “free and democratic,” calling such interventionism a mission America can no longer afford.
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First, he praised Middle Eastern leaders for building “Before our eyes a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence. We don’t want that.” Then, he turned on Western interventionism with a blunt critique:
“And it’s crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists …… the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.” Trump accused interveners of destroying more nations than they’d built, meddling in “complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
Then came the speech’s bombshell:
“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins ...… I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment; my job, to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace. That’s what I really want to do.”
Undoubtedly, this was Trump’s most ideological speech yet—a weary world cop’s resignation letter, signaling the end of America’s decades-long “values diplomacy.” Its ripple effects will shape global politics for years.
This isn’t madness; it’s rooted in history. As John Mearsheimer argues in Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, America’s “liberal hegemony”—its crusade to spread democracy—has been a costly failure. Mearsheimer contends that even if liberal states could achieve their objectives — spreading democracy, promoting economic engagement, and building international institutions — these efforts would not bring about peace. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump’s speech in Riyadh was essentially a popularized version of Mearsheimer’s ideas.
Mearsheimer notes in his book, since 1989, the United States has been at war two out of every three years, fighting seven different wars. This should not come as a surprise. Contrary to popular Western wisdom, liberal foreign policy is not a formula for cooperation and peace but one for instability and conflict.
Why? Mearsheimer believes that realism and nationalism are the two Nemesis of liberal hegemony. Among them, nationalism is the most powerful ideology in the world. The main reason for the desperate failure of liberal foreign policy is that it cannot defeat nationalism. His ideas were not his own creation; they were the product of the evolution of political trends in the United States over the past decade. Trump's Riyadh speech marked the official defeat of liberal foreign policy and the victory of conservatism in the long political debate between liberal and conservatives in the United States.
Where will a world without “world-police” go? Time will tell. But one thing’s clear: those obsessed with “grand chessboard” theories of global domination? It’s past your bedtime.
Epilogue:
Uncle Sam sighs, weary from the beat.
The world’s cop hangs up his badge, retreat.
Let nations climb their own damn hills—
No more “grand strategies” to fuel the thrills.
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