If the news in the hours after the Trump administration assassinated the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani felt like the six months leading up to the Iraq War squeezed into one evening, then the weeks after the killing resembled, with uncanny absurdity, those events played backward. We watched Mike Pence attempting to link Soleimani to September 11 and Mike Pompeo describing Iranians dancing in the streets—even as video showed many of them mourning—and we listened to the administration’s ever-shifting explanations for the strike. It’s as if instead of spending months building a case for war, the Bush administration suddenly announced that they had already arrested and executed Saddam Hussein, and only then got around to feeding cooked intelligence to The New York Times.

Trump’s slapdash approach might be as effective as Bush’s carefully orchestrated Iraq rollout, in part because the American political press does not need much prodding to sanitize our deranged foreign policy. Journalists rarely question our national right to do as we please anywhere on Earth, merely what we choose to do. Or, as The New York Times’s editorial board put it: “The real question to ask about the American drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise.”

Whichever party occupies the White House or the Senate majority leader’s chair, America’s foreign policy always seems to remain deeply conservative, at least according to Corey Robin’s formulation of conservatism’s guiding impulse as “liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.” On the international stage, that dictum means that the United States is allowed to act lawlessly, and other countries feel our wrath when they oppose us. “When it comes to projecting power,” the military historian Andrew J. Bacevich has written, “the United States exempts itself from norms with which it expects others to comply.”

The extent of our hypocrisy has been particularly obvious in recent years, but its roots run deep. In 1952, Reinhold Niebuhr said that only Russia could rival the United States in thinking itself “the most innocent nation on earth.” We are, he wrote, incapable of believing “that anyone could think ill of us.” The next year, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government in favor of the authoritarian Shah—the start of a global rampage of covert meddling carried out with oblivious indifference to potential backlash.

In the midst of that rampage came one of America’s rare postwar triumphs on the global stage: the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Veterans of the Kennedy administration have spent decades praising themselves for preventing nuclear war. But even a simple reading of the chain of events leading up to the crisis shows how deluded that official narrative is.