Reality Always Wins
A new Substack by Center for the National Interest president Paul Saunders explores how reality inevitably prevails over those who try to ignore, deny, or forcibly reshape it. In his inaugural post, Saunders traces the title back to a 2004 quote from a Bush administration official who dismissed the “reality-based community” and claimed that the U.S., as an empire, could simply create its own reality through action. Two decades later, with the Iraq project’s collapse in clear view, Saunders reflects on why reality almost always wins in the end—punishing those who ignore it with mounting costs—and why the rare individuals who manage to genuinely reshape it, whether gradually or abruptly, are so few.