Politics & Power Quote by Robert Trout

There is a deliberate bait-and-switch in Trout's phrasing: "restored" is doing almost all the ideological work. It smuggles in a moral conclusion - that colonial possession is an abnormality now being corrected - before the reader can argue about the politics of who governs Hong Kong next. By choosing the vocabulary of repair rather than transfer, Trout frames the 1997 handover as an act of historical housekeeping, not a gamble with 6 million lives.

The second move is more pointed: he drafts "any patriotic American" into a celebration of China's victory. That's not a plea for affection toward Beijing; it's a shot across the bow at American self-image. Trout, a mid-century broadcast journalist steeped in Cold War rhetoric, flips the usual script where patriotism means opposing communism. He implies that American patriotism, if it's to mean anything beyond reflex, should include an allergy to empire - even when the empire is British, and even when the beneficiary is a rival superpower.

The subtext is an argument about consistency. The U.S. was born as an anti-colonial project, and yet often cozied up to colonial arrangements when they served Western power. Trout is calling that bluff, using "patriotic" as a pressure word: if you claim the mantle of freedom, you don't get to treat decolonization as someone else's romantic cause. It's a compact piece of moral jujitsu, delivered in the plain cadence of broadcast certainty.