By Noah Rothman
Friday, May 09, 2025
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.
This faith-based initiative is fueled by an unspoken,
perhaps even unacknowledged, desire to see foreign leaders who reject
Eurocratic center-leftism slink away from public life, defeated and unloved.
His downfall would validate progressive presumptions about how the world should
work. Unfortunately for the international left, Milei has not lived down to
those expectations. “Javier Milei has the 2nd highest approval rating of all
world leaders according to Morning Consult,” the
Manhattan Institute’s Daniel Di Martino observed this week. At 61 percent
approval among Argentinians, Milei trails only India’s Narendra Modi when it
comes to being popular among his constituents.
What explains Milei’s success? Nothing especially
remarkable. The Argentinian leader ran for the presidency promising to
implement libertarian economic prescriptions to cut public spending, unshackle
the private economy, and boost supplies to meet demand (thus, putting downward
pressure on inflation). He didn’t smuggle into the presidency a suite of policy
preferences entirely unrelated to the economic reforms on which he ran.
Instead, he focused on delivering reduced regulatory burdens, unlocking Argentina’s
entrepreneurial potential, and delivering prosperity that would reduce poverty
and inflation. That’s what he did.
It’s amazing what a little honesty and intellectual
consistency can do. Milei entered office a devotee of tried-and-true
prescriptions for economic success — prescriptions buttressed by a wealth of
literature and philosophy. He didn’t deviate from that course or improvise a
uniquely Milei-narian approach to libertarian economics. Nor did he become
distracted by the temptation to intervene in (and become consumed with) the
fleeting controversies of the day. He won a mandate to do one job. He did it
narrowly and well, and his voters appreciate it.
Imagine that.
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