Politics & Power Quote by Donald Evans

The sentence performs government optimism the way a ribbon-cutting performs progress: loudly, ceremonially, and just vague enough to be unaccountable. Donald Evans, speaking as a public servant in the trade-and-investment lane of early-2000s U.S. diplomacy, isn’t trying to dazzle with policy detail. He’s trying to signal motion. The “announcement” is the message; the actual delegation is almost a prop.

Notice the time-stretching syntax: “announcing today” that something will happen “sometime in the future.” It’s a classic bureaucratic two-step that generates headline-ready momentum while buying maximum flexibility. The double “bring businesses” also reveals the framing: American firms are the principal actors, Morocco the stage. Morocco is pitched not as a partner with its own industrial strategy but as a landscape of “vast business opportunities” waiting to be recognized, toured, and translated into deals.

The subtext is diplomatic reassurance. To Moroccan officials, it says: Washington sees you as stable, investable, and worth courting. To U.S. companies, it says: this market is being politically de-risked for you; the government is willing to shepherd introductions and soften uncertainties. To domestic audiences, it’s a tidy export of American confidence - commerce as foreign policy, investment as friendship.

What makes it work is its deliberate blandness. “Vast opportunities” is an empty vessel that different listeners can fill with ports, textiles, tourism, energy, or simply geopolitical alignment. It’s not poetry; it’s a bridge, built from ambiguity and the promise of arrival.