Politics & Power Quote by Adam Schiff

A moral bromide becomes a geopolitical dare in Adam Schiff's tidy invocation of the Golden Rule. By laundering foreign policy through Sunday-school ethics, he sidesteps the blood-and-steel language that usually attends national interest and replaces it with something stickier: reciprocity. The line is designed to sound disarmingly obvious, which is precisely its power. If you accept the premise, any exception starts to look like hypocrisy rather than strategy.

Schiff's intent is less about theological virtue than about democratic self-image. "As in all others" quietly claims consensus: decent communities live by reciprocal restraint, and America wants to count itself among the decent. That framing matters because it shifts the argument from what we can do to what we should do, turning international conduct into a test of character. The subtext is aimed inward. He's not really negotiating with "other nations"; he's pressuring American listeners to feel the discomfort of double standards - interventions we justify, alliances we excuse, norms we demand but sometimes ignore.

The context for a Schiff line like this is the post-Iraq, post-9/11 hangover and the broader era of contested American power, when "rules-based order" became both slogan and battlefield. It's also a politician's move: universal principle as a shield against charges of partisanship. Critics can argue about interests, threats, and realism; it's harder to openly argue against fairness without sounding like you prefer impunity. Schiff turns morality into leverage, and he does it with a sentence built to be quoted back at America when it falls short.