There is a piece of advice that has become so common it now passes for sophistication. You hear it from supporters and critics alike, from people who agree with me on almost everything and from people who agree with me on nothing: “Don’t listen to what he says. Pay attention to what he does.” It is offered as the worldly counsel of someone who has seen through the noise, who refuses to be fooled by speeches and knows that only actions count. And every time I hear it, I object — not mildly, but flatly. The advice is not wisdom. It is a mistake, and a harmful one, because it asks us to disarm ourselves in precisely the domain where the most powerful people on earth do their most consequential work. We live in a world of words and of information. Ignoring what leaders say is not realism. It is a refusal to look at half of reality, and the more powerful the speaker, the larger that half becomes.
Let me begin with the simplest possible refutation, the kind you can measure. Since the start of this year, with no treaty signed, no sanctions lifted, no concrete deal concluded — nothing but a change in tone from Washington, a warmth in the way the American president began to speak about Moscow — the Russian ruble strengthened by roughly seventeen percent. Seventeen percent, from words. The exchange rate is not a feeling or an interpretation; it is a number that millions of economic actors set with their own money, and it moved that far on rhetoric alone. Why? Because when the leader of the most powerful country on earth stops describing Russia as a pariah and starts describing it as a partner one can do business with, every trader, banker, and investor recalculates. The words rewrite the frame through which an entire economy is perceived, and the recalculation is the deed. So when someone tells me Trump’s words don’t matter, I want to ask: then who appreciated the ruble? Some invisible hand of pure action? No. It was the words. The president’s words, with nothing behind them yet, already reached into people’s lives and rearranged them.
In the beginning was the Word
I keep returning to the old line — in the beginning was the Word — not as scripture but as an observation about how human reality is actually built. My own words, as I speak them, have some small weight; they reach a few people and may nudge a thought here or there. The words of a president of the most powerful nation on earth weigh a million times more. They are not commentary on events. They are events. This is why I find the fashionable counsel not merely wrong but destructive: it trains people to look past the very mechanism by which power now operates. Words conceal intentions, yes — but that is exactly the reason to study them, not to wave them away. The proper response to the fact that rhetoric hides things is to build a culture of accountability around it: to learn to recognize what is being done with language, to analyze it, to hold it to account. Telling people to ignore speech because speech can deceive is like telling them to ignore the sky because weather is hard to predict.
The mechanism by which words become deeds is not mysterious, and it has a name. There is a principle from the social sciences sometimes called the Thomas theorem: if people define a situation as real, it becomes real in its consequences. We do not act on the world as it is; we act on the world as we interpret it, and our interpretations are shaped by what authoritative voices tell us is happening or about to happen. This is the logic of the self-fulfilling prophecy. When a prediction is made publicly and loudly enough, people begin to plan their actions around it, and in planning around it they bring it about. The classic illustration comes from banking: if someone credible declares that a bank is collapsing, depositors rush to withdraw their money, and the rush itself — not any prior weakness — is what topples the bank. The prophecy did not describe a fact. It manufactured one.
Apply that to the talk, now circulating, of a “new Yalta” — a world carved into spheres of influence, the great powers each dominating their region, a nineteenth-century imperial map redrawn for our century. I consider the idea a utopia, and an unworkable one: you cannot box in a giant like today’s China, and the proposed triangle is grotesquely lopsided, two genuine economic powers and then an economic dwarf whose only ticket to the table is its nuclear arsenal. But here is the danger, and it is precisely the danger of words. Even to float this scheme, to think aloud about it, to treat it as thinkable — that already shifts the ground. It nudges a leader away from even verbal opposition to aggression and toward open partnership with the aggressor. It signals to the Kremlin that the prize it wants is now imaginable in Washington. The prophecy of a new Yalta, merely by being uttered by someone with power, helps summon the thing it names. That is not harmless speculation. That is a bank run in slow motion, and the deposit at risk is the security of a continent.
How aggression is laundered through vocabulary
There is a second, subtler reason words are deeds, and it concerns what happens when we let the powerful redefine our vocabulary. Consider the quiet substitution by which a war becomes a “conflict in Ukraine.” It sounds like a small thing, a matter of tone. It is not. To call it a war is to keep alive the question that matters most: who started it, who invaded whom, who is the aggressor and who is defending their home. To rename it a “conflict” — some unfortunate situation that broke out, which sensible grown men from Russia and America must now step in to resolve — is to erase that question entirely. The aggression is laundered. The invader is reframed as one party to a misunderstanding, even as a peacemaker. This is exactly the Kremlin’s own technique, perfected over years: a war of conquest is christened a “special military operation”; an army defending its land is recast as a foreign legion of mercenaries; the very people being bombed are blamed for provoking a stronger neighbor. The vocabulary does the moral work that the tanks cannot. Whoever controls the naming controls what can even be thought about who is guilty. So when an American leader starts speaking of “land” and “power plants” to be redistributed, of concessions only Ukraine must make, the words are not idle — they are quietly rewriting the map of guilt in advance of any deal.
This is why I refuse the counsel to stop listening even when — especially when — the speaker lies constantly. People ask me: what is the point of analyzing the statements of a man who, by some counts, speaks untruths in the great majority of his speeches? The point is that his lies are not noise to be filtered out; they are data to be tracked. Tracking the lies is itself a tool of analysis, perhaps the sharpest one available. The decisive fact about this particular liar is that he does not merely lie and move on — he then acts in accordance with the lie. He invents a fiction about thousands of surrounded soldiers spared only by his mercy, and the fiction tells you he has joined himself to the Kremlin’s narrative and will act inside it. He says a country was foolish to provoke a stronger power, and the statement reveals a whole worldview: the law of the strong, the conviction that whoever holds the cards is entitled to win and whoever was dealt a poor hand deserves their fate. To ignore such words would be to throw away the clearest map we have of where the actions are headed. The lie is a confession of intent.
Calling things by their proper names
If words are this powerful, then naming them correctly is not aggression — it is honesty, and it is a duty. When an American president declares, through an avalanche of anti-immigration orders and openly hostile rhetoric, that the Islamic world is hostile to his country, he has handed a gift to the very radicals he claims to oppose. Two billion people are told, from the most powerful podium on earth, that they are regarded as enemies. This is exactly the message terrorists have spent years trying to provoke — the collective punishment of an entire faith, the confirmation that the West sees all of them as suspects. The words alone radicalize; the words alone corrode a nation’s soft power, that quiet influence built over decades on openness and welcome, which evaporates the moment the welcome is withdrawn. No bomb was needed to do this damage. A declaration did it. Again: the word was the deed.
And so I come to the objection I hear most, which is that taking words seriously means inventing a whole new language, calling a president something other than president and a court something other than a court until our speech collapses under a thousand qualifications. I do not accept that. Taking words seriously does not require semantic inflation — it requires precision. There is no need for an elaborate new glossary with a distinct term for every gradation of fraud. There is only the need to call things by their proper names when the ordinary name has become a lie. We have already stopped calling certain Kremlin mouthpieces journalists; we call them propagandists, because that is simply what they are, and the word is truer. We can call the man who launched this war a war criminal, as so many do, because that is what he is, not an insult but a description. To name Putin a war criminal and his loudest televised servant a propagandist is not to debase language — it is to refuse to let language be debased by treating usurpation as governance and aggression as policy. The danger is never in naming things accurately. The danger is always in the soothing, sophisticated-sounding advice to look away from what is said — to treat the most consequential utterances on earth as mere chatter, while the prophecies they contain quietly arrange the world to match. Words are deeds. To pretend otherwise is, at best, a failure of attention, and at worst, a kind of complicity. We do not have the luxury of not listening.