Politics & Power Quote by Don Nickles

Nickles’s line is a tidy piece of federalist salesmanship: reassure listeners that he’s not an empire-builder, then carve out one arena where Washington must be the grown-up in the room. The pivot from “the federal government” to “our collective government” isn’t decorative. It’s a rhetorical inoculation against anti-Washington sentiment, recasting the capital as a shared instrument rather than a distant bureaucracy. If you’re suspicious of centralized power, he’s offering a compromise: keep most authority close to home, but don’t pretend states can deter missiles.

The phrase “responsibilities that none of these other levels of government can fulfill” does two jobs at once. It elevates national defense as uniquely federal while quietly implying that other federal responsibilities are optional, debatable, or better devolved. “Chief among these” narrows the conversation further, setting defense as the trump card in budget fights: whatever you cut, don’t cut this. It also functions as a moral hierarchy, where security is framed as precondition for everything else government might do.

Context matters: Nickles, a Republican senator shaped by the late Cold War and post-Vietnam skepticism, spoke to an electorate that often wanted smaller government but also wanted an assertive military. The subtext is strategic: you can be fiscally conservative and still fund the Pentagon aggressively, because defense isn’t “big government” in this telling - it’s the one form of bigness the states can’t fake.