War & Peace Quote by Craig Armstrong

The joke lands because it’s dressed up as common-sense optimism while quietly admitting to a very American fantasy: that politics is basically an audio mixer where you can slide every desirable track up without creating feedback. Armstrong’s “I believe” isn’t policy talk; it’s the language of aspiration, the same rhetoric used to sell movie scores and campaign slogans alike. It cues you to feel uplifted, then immediately sabotages that feeling with a shopping list of contradictions.

“Lower deficits but higher spending” is the cleanest gag: a taut, accountant’s paradox delivered like a reasonable preference. The line exposes how bipartisan wish-casting works in public life. We’re conditioned to treat hard tradeoffs as optional, as if the moral position is simply wanting nice outcomes in bulk.

The military bit sharpens the satire by mimicking post-9/11 vernacular. “More peace” paired with “a bigger military” is already doublethink, but “kills terrorists and whatnot” is the tell: a deliberately sloppy coda that punctures the solemnity of security rhetoric. It suggests how easily violence is laundered through vague, tired phrasing when the speaker wants to keep the self-image of being peaceable.

Then the SUV line nails consumer entitlement. “A cleaner environment” is framed not as an ecological reckoning but as a lifestyle upgrade that must not inconvenience anyone. The subtext is brutal: we want virtue without sacrifice, outcomes without costs, and we’ll call it pragmatism. As a composer, Armstrong is attuned to tone; here he’s scoring a culture that demands major-key solutions to minor-key realities.