Politics & Power Quote by Norman Angell

Angell’s line lands like a polite accusation: everyone swears they want peace, yet they behave as if peace is a side hobby. The power is in the deliberate mismatch between stated desire and chosen strategy. “Sincerely” isn’t a compliment; it’s a trap. If the desire is genuine, then the sabotage is structural, embedded in what states consider “normal” policy - arms buildups, alliance gamesmanship, economic coercion, prestige politics. Angell isn’t calling leaders hypocrites so much as diagnosing a system where rational moves at home become reckless in aggregate.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “All nations” flattens moral hierarchies; the criticism doesn’t spare the “good” side. “If persisted in” introduces time as the villain: today’s defensive measure becomes tomorrow’s inevitability. The sentence moves from psychology (“desires”) to momentum (“pursue courses”) to fatalism (“must make peace impossible”), mirroring how conflicts harden from intentions into machinery.

Context matters: Angell wrote in an era when Europe’s great powers loudly advertised stability while sleepwalking into World War I. His broader argument in The Great Illusion was that modern interdependence made war economically irrational - and yet irrationality still won, because pride, fear, and misread incentives can overpower spreadsheets. The subtext is modern enough to sting: peace isn’t a feeling nations have; it’s a discipline they practice. Without changing the “courses” - what governments fund, threaten, and normalize - sincerity becomes just another accelerant.