It’s amazing what a little honesty and intellectual consistency can do.

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.