Daily Inspiration Quote by Lord Robertson

Regional wars rarely stay regional for long; Robertson’s line is a bid to puncture the comforting fantasy that “sitting it out” is a neutral, low-cost position. As a diplomat and former NATO secretary general, he’s speaking from a worldview shaped by the post-Cold War pattern: Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - crises sold as local until spillover (refugees, terrorism, energy shocks, great-power meddling) made them everyone’s problem. The sentence is built to feel like a trap closing. “Again and again” turns intervention debates into an inevitability loop, not a one-off moral dilemma. “Cruel choice” is the key bit of stagecraft: it frames policymakers as choosing between two punishments, not between virtue and vice.

The subtext is strategic and political. Strategically, he’s arguing that security is an ecosystem: ignore one burning corner and the smoke finds you. Politically, he’s laundering agency into fatalism. If every option is “costly,” then the real question becomes who pays, when, and in what currency - blood, money, legitimacy, domestic cohesion. “Costly engagement” acknowledges the West’s intervention fatigue and the reputational damage of failed nation-building; he’s conceding critics’ strongest point. “Costly indifference” rebukes the opposite camp: the price of restraint doesn’t show up as a line item, but it arrives as destabilized regions, emboldened aggressors, and humanitarian catastrophe that corrodes the very order diplomats claim to defend.

It works because it refuses comfort. Robertson isn’t offering a doctrine; he’s narrowing the rhetorical escape routes, forcing audiences to admit that opting out is still a choice, and still a bill.