Wit & Attitude Quote by Leon Kass

Kass is doing something rhetorically sly here: he refuses the dopamine hit of moral panic. The line starts by granting the audience its favorite premise - yes, there are "rogue countries", yes, they do objectionable things - and then quietly pulls the rug out from the usual policy reflex: imitation as self-defense. The phrase "we wish nobody did" signals a broader ethical horizon than national interest; it’s not just that an adversary is threatening us, it’s that a boundary of human conduct is being crossed. That framing matters because it moves the argument from strategy to standards.

The real pressure point is "justify our following suit". Kass is targeting the perennial excuse machine of modern governance: if someone else dirties their hands, we get to do it too, just with better paperwork. Calling it "their foolishness" is a deliberate diminishment. He’s not flattering the rival as a formidable chess player; he’s demoting them to a bad example. That undercuts the fear-based narrative that says escalation is inevitable.

Contextually, Kass’s public career is steeped in bioethics and the politics of technological power, where the "rogue country" argument shows up constantly: cloning, germline editing, surveillance, torture, enhancement. His sentence is a warning against a race-to-the-bottom logic masquerading as realism. Subtext: a nation that defines itself by copying the worst behavior of its enemies has already conceded the argument about who it is. The cleverness is that he makes restraint sound less like sainthood than like self-respect.