Politics & Power Quote by Cordell Hull

Hull’s sentence performs a delicate postwar magic trick: it tries to turn catastrophe into political capital without sounding callous about the catastrophe. The opening word, "Fortunately", is doing the hard work. It doesn’t deny the horror of war; it reframes the aftermath as an opportunity that must not be squandered. That rhetorical pivot matters because Hull is speaking from inside the machinery of statecraft, where hope has to be engineered, not merely felt.

The phrasing "not alone... but as well" has the cadence of a brief for the jury. He offers two exhibits: first, the "stark realization" that another war would be globally ruinous; second, the "creation of an international agency" - a clear nod to the United Nations moment and the broader post-World War II institutional surge. Hull’s intent is to legitimize multilateralism as the rational response to modern war’s scale, a world where oceans no longer buffer consequences.

The subtext is less sunny. "If they so desire" quietly shifts responsibility onto nations themselves, acknowledging the fatal weak point of any international body: it has no independent will strong enough to override nationalist appetites. Peace isn’t promised; it’s made conditional on political choice. "Make peace a living reality" sells an institution not as idealism but as infrastructure - a system that can convert shared fear into routine cooperation. Coming from a public servant, that’s the real pitch: administration as antidote to apocalypse.