Status Quo vs. Revisionist Powers

"the problem is that [the country in question] is not a status quo power. It seeks to export its ideology and interprets resistance as hostility."

That's Michael Rubin, describing the Islamic Republic of Iran.  And casting Iran as a revisionist power seems fair enough.  But there's the question of who's been doing the revising lately?  Or, to put it more bluntly, does the United States qualify, by any stretch of the imagination, as a status quo power today?

Thankfully, I attended a briefing with Rubin's AEI colleague Tom Donnelly in 2005 in which Donnelly remarked (click through to 2:41:00) that "the United States is not a status quo power.  We have never been a status quo power, and hopefully we will never be a status quo power.  The United States is the greatest revolutionary power in the history of mankind."

So it's a bit rich to hear AEI analysts grousing about how a (much weaker) foreign power has revisionist designs when you can hear your colleagues down the hall characterizing your own country in this way.  Think how it sounds in Tehran.