The West has gotten into a terrible habit of mistaking words for deeds — and press conferences for reality.

Part of this comes from the rise of the academic world, in which people who have achieved nothing have enormous power over institutions – and confuse faculty lounge debates with the real world.

Another part of this problem comes from the mass media’s ability to instantly project an event to you — wherever you are. 

We can watch everything from a White House press conference, Congressional leaders at the Capitol, top brass speaking from the Pentagon, and governors or mayors making grand announcements live no matter what we are doing. 

All these events portray a sense of power — whether it’s because of the setting, the context, or the impact of good staging, sound, and lighting.

However, great proclamations are not the same as great deeds.

President Lyndon Johnson grandly announced a War on Poverty and the creation of a Great Society. Yet neither achieved their goals — or arguably even came into being. 

In foreign policy, Johnson took up his predecessor’s promise that “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” 

Neither President Kennedy nor Johnson realized that the world was much harder than anyone in Washington understood. The Bay of Pigs and the defeat in Vietnam both taught us that lesson.

After the first Iraq War, President George H.W. Bush announced that we were building a New World Order. That vision was buried by the collapse of Boris Yeltsin and democracy in Russia, the continued rise of Islamist extremism in the Middle East, the Chinese Communists’ determination to strengthen their dictatorship, and the rise of South and Central American drug cartels that were carriers of death and despair.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush promised to win the war against terrorism and identified the Axis of Evil as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. A quarter-century later, North Korea and Iran are still standing. 

The defeat of Baathist Iraq — and its reorganization into a functioning but hardly Western country — took thousands of American lives and billions of dollars.

There is a danger that President Trump and his administration are going to fall into the press conference versus reality cycle that has become so common in the modern era.

Saying something important is simply not the same as doing something important.

There is a semi-truce in Gaza, but it is a fighting truce. No one in Hamas is giving up the goal that “not a single Jew will remain” in Israel (as is written into Hamas’s charter). 

Venezuela’s two top leaders have been captured and brought to America, but the Hugo Chávez-Nicolás Maduro machine is still in charge of the country — and capable of killing opponents if they become too open.

The West has tried a variety of ways to reach a truce between Ukraine and Russia. Yet for four years, Vladimir Putin’s response has been more violence and more methodical destruction of Ukraine. We talk. He kills.

The Iranian dictatorship is still pursuing a hardline path toward nuclear weapons, advanced missiles, and absolute control of the Iranian people. 

The recent report that the dictatorship has killed 544 protesters and arrested 10,681 more is a grim reminder that ruthless dictatorships are hard to overthrow if their leadership is willing to kill enough people. 

Remember Tiananmen Square and the ruthless nationwide repression led by the former Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping. The West considered him a reformer leading China toward a more open society.

Many years ago, Senator Connie Mack taught me that effective leaders get what they inspect, not what they expect.

In too many instances, our current Western political systems set incredibly high expectations at  incredibly positive press conferences — and then inspects nothing. The gap between hope and reality is far too wide. It will not narrow without a new approach of accountability and responsibility.

It is time to focus on results and solving real problems — not being drawn into rhetoric without real achievements. Results that are expected but not inspected are merely fantasies. 

The world is too dangerous. It is critical that the Trump administration insists on real achievement rather than rhetoric or fantasy.