Politics & Power Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Diplomacy often hides its anxiety behind a calm sentence, and Frank B. Kellogg’s assurance does exactly that. On the surface, it’s a mild progress report: two countries haven’t signed, but don’t worry, they will. The real work of the line is psychological. It converts an unresolved, potentially destabilizing problem into a matter of scheduling. “Not yet” is a small phrase that turns refusal into delay, disagreement into paperwork.

Kellogg was speaking in an era when “naval limitation” had become a shorthand for a bigger dream: that arms races could be negotiated out of existence by respectable men in respectable rooms. After World War I, publics were exhausted, budgets were strained, and the prestige of “peace through treaties” was high. But so was suspicion. France and Italy were not just holdouts; they were Mediterranean powers with overlapping ambitions, raw security fears, and domestic politics that rewarded toughness. Kellogg’s confidence is less prediction than pressure: a public nudge designed to make noncompliance look temporary and faintly unreasonable.

The subtext is strategic optimism. By projecting inevitability, he tries to create it. That’s classic statecraft when you can’t compel: you narrate the future as settled, so the reluctant parties feel the cost of being the lone obstacle. The line also reassures audiences at home that the diplomatic machine is still running, that peace remains the default trajectory. In retrospect, it reads like a snapshot of interwar faith - earnest, managerial, and slightly brittle - in the belief that signatures could outrun rivalries.