This blog posting is not to announce that I have left behind my teetotalling ways. It is also not a suggestion that one good way to react to the events of our present moment (and to survive them) is to kick back, chill, and quaff a nice, cool, tall one. According to a website devoted to the Gilmore Girls, which is where I got the image above, the phrase, "Miller Time" has come to mean that "it's time to relax."
I do not believe that "it's time to relax." Quite the opposite. In fact, what I mean by "Miller Time," in this blog posting, can be read on the contemptuous face you can see below. In case you don't immediately recognize it, that face belongs to Stephen Miller, who is serving as our current president's deputy chief of staff. I talked about him in my blog posting yesterday, too. For a commentary by someone else, here's a link to an article in The Guardian.
Below, here are some words from Miller himself, as garned from William Galston's January 6, 2026, column in The Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):
After seizing Mr. Maduro and his wife, Mr. Trump renewed his demand to acquire Greenland. Pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper on whether this could involve the use of force, Stephen Miller, one of the president’s most influential advisers, replied: “There’s no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you’re asking of a military operation. Nobody’s gonna fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” Similarly troubling was a comment that revealed his outlook on foreign policy: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
An article in The New York Times also quoted Miller (on both Greenland and Venezuela), pretty much to the same effect (emphasis added):
Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, asserted on Monday that Greenland rightfully belonged to the United States and that the Trump administration could seize the semiautonomous Danish territory if it wanted.
“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper, the CNN host, after being asked repeatedly whether he would rule out using military force.
The remarks were part of a vocal push by Mr. Miller, long a powerful behind-the-scenes player in Trump administration policy, to justify American imperialism and a vision for a new world order in which the United States could freely overthrow national governments and take foreign territory and resources so long as it was in the national interest.
Finally, let me quote Oona A. Hathaway, who is a professor of law and political science at Yale and is the president-elect of the American Society of International Law. Her opinion column in The Times tells us that "The Great Unraveling Has Begun."
What does Hathaway mean by that? I urge you to read the full article to see. I am informed that no paywall should prevent you from doing that, so just click the link. In short, Hathaway indicates that the kind of approach to foreign relations espoused by Stephen Miller - "might makes right," meaning that the United States can and should just take whatever it wants, since it's powerful enough to do so - would be a "blatant assault on the international legal order," and would end eight decades of relative peace. "Unraveling" is one way to say it.
If you think back to the years of your lifetime, Hathaway is telling us that those years have been, for the most part, years of "relative peace." Since I am eighty-two years old, my own experience does encompass all of those eight decades called out by Hathaway, and I wouldn't exactly call them "peaceful." However, Hathaway is talking about a comparison of post-World War II conditions to the conditions that came before. In that context, you can make a case that things have been much better over those eighty years than they were during World War I (16 million civilian and military casualties) and during World War II, which was the deadliest military conflict in history, with 70–85 million deaths caused by the conflict, representing about 3% of the estimated global population of 2.3 billion in 1940.
Now, of course, nuclear weapons will be available in any major new conflict, and it's questionable that anyone will survive a war in which they are deployed. Back in 1963, Bob Dylan pointed this out, singing that if "God's on our side He'll stop the next war."
Stephen Miller, obviously, thinks he knows better.
Hathaway says that "as the United States fails to abide by the underlying principle of the international legal system it once championed, the already ailing system faces total collapse."
There may still be a chance to save it, but the decades of imperfect but transformative peace that the U.N. Charter helped create cannot survive what I am calling "Miller Time."
It's no time to kick back and relax!
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