Politics & Power Quote by George William Norris

Norris frames the unthinkable - war on two fronts - as a coolly logical option, and that calm is the point. The opening, "First", reads like a lawyer’s outline, not a drumbeat. He’s not selling blood and glory; he’s itemizing alternatives. By laying out the maximalist response ("gone to war against both of these nations") he highlights how absurd it is to treat every provocation as a casus belli, especially when great powers are busy testing the limits of "neutral rights" in practice.

The phrase "could have" does double work. It asserts capacity while withholding endorsement, a rhetorical feint that lets Norris sound tough without becoming bellicose. He borrows the language of legitimacy - "violation of international law" - because legalism was the respectable vocabulary of restraint in the early 20th century. Neutrality wasn’t just a posture; it was a claim to economic freedom, maritime access, and sovereign dignity. When belligerents interfered, the injury was real, but Norris implies the remedy should not be reflexive violence.

The subtext is a warning about selective outrage. By referencing "both of them", he points toward hypocrisy: if interference with neutral rights is the standard, consistency would demand confronting every offender, not just the politically convenient one. That’s a thinly veiled critique of how publics are steered toward a single enemy narrative. In the shadow of World War I-era debates over shipping, blockades, and propaganda, Norris’ sentence works as an antidote to emotional escalation: it performs reason to expose the machinery that manufactures consent for war.