Politics & Power Quote by J. William Fulbright

Calling the United States a "conservative power" is the sly move here. Fulbright isn’t praising American restraint so much as trapping it in its own self-image. If the U.S. thinks of itself as a stabilizer, the argument goes, it can’t behave like an improvisational empire. A conservative power doesn’t get to treat international life as a series of exceptions; it has to protect the structure that keeps the whole system from tipping into chaos.

"Vital interest" is doing heavy lifting. Fulbright reframes law not as idealism or charity but as self-preservation. International law becomes national security by other means: a way to make American power cheaper to use, easier to justify, and less likely to boomerang into endless conflicts. The phrase "reign of law" is deliberately monarchic, suggesting that rules should rule - not merely guide - states. He’s selling constraint as dominance’s best technology.

Context matters: Fulbright built his reputation as the Senate’s most prominent critic of Vietnam and of the broader Cold War habit of treating anti-communism as a permission slip. His warning is implicit: a superpower that normalizes bending rules will eventually find itself either isolated, overextended, or forced to escalate to compensate for lost legitimacy. The line also hints at reciprocity: if the U.S. wants others bound by norms, it must accept being bound too. That’s the real provocation - not that law is good, but that American freedom of action is the costliest illusion in foreign policy.