War & Peace Quote by Virginia Foxx

America does not fight for land, glory or riches is the kind of patriotic sentence that works by preemptively deleting history. Its power lies in its clean negation: three old-world motives, ritually denied, to make room for a fourth that goes unstated but loudly implied - virtue. In one breath, the line recasts U.S. military action as uniquely moral, almost antiseptic, as if national force can be separated from national interest.

Virginia Foxx, a contemporary politician, isn’t offering a nuanced thesis; she’s offering a shield. The phrasing is designed for a chamber speech, a press clip, a fundraiser: simple, declarative, unarguable without sounding unpatriotic. The triad (land, glory, riches) is a rhetorical classic because it feels comprehensive. If you deny those, what’s left must be defense, freedom, humanitarian duty - or at least the comforting story Americans prefer to tell themselves.

The subtext, though, is transactional. It asks the listener to accept the premise that U.S. motives are fundamentally different from other empires, then uses that premise to launder present-day conflicts. If America isn’t fighting for material gain, then questions about oil, bases, contracts, geopolitical leverage, and domestic political incentives can be framed as cynicism rather than accountability.

Context matters: post-9/11 rhetoric and the long War on Terror mainstreamed a moralized vocabulary of war, where intentions are treated as the evidence. Foxx’s line belongs to that tradition. It’s not a description of what states do; it’s an argument for what citizens should stop asking.