Education Quote by Lee H. Hamilton

Power is most dangerous when it feels routine. Lee H. Hamilton, a career congressional foreign-policy hand, is warning against the American habit of treating dominance as a default setting rather than a temporary condition with a price tag. The line "cannot be put off" is doing more than urging urgency; it’s a rebuke to Washington’s favorite coping mechanism: delay the hard moral accounting, manage the headlines, call it strategy.

Hamilton frames resentment as a global fact, not a public-relations glitch. That’s the subtext: people don’t resent America because they misunderstand it; they resent what its power can do when it stops noticing its own footprint. The phrase "predominant power" is clinical, almost bureaucratic, which makes the second half land harder. "Great restraint" isn’t idealism here. It’s self-preservation. In his telling, restraint is not weakness; it’s the only sustainable way to lead without turning every intervention, base agreement, sanction, or lecture into a fresh recruitment poster for anti-Americanism.

Context matters: Hamilton’s worldview was shaped by the post-Cold War moment and especially the post-9/11 era, when U.S. supremacy met the limits of legitimacy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader "war on terror". He’s writing against the intoxication of unipolarity. Antagonizing "the world" is a deliberately blunt endpoint: ignore resentment long enough, and you don’t just lose popularity; you manufacture coalitions against you. Restraint, then, becomes a strategic ethic - the rare kind that reads like caution and functions like realism.