Politics & Power Quote by Dick Armey

Armey’s line is crafted as reassurance, but it’s also a preemptive framing device: America, he implies, is the kind of country that doesn’t do “unprovoked” violence. That single adverb does most of the political work. It plants a moral boundary while leaving a wide gate open for action labeled provoked, defensive, retaliatory, or preventive. The sentence reads like a promise; the subtext is permission.

Notice how he leans on identity rather than evidence. “Consistent with what we have been” invokes a patriotic self-image that functions like a legal alibi: if the nation’s character is good, then its choices must be, too. Then he pivots to “what we should be,” shifting from history to aspiration. That move is strategic in Washington language, where the past is messy (Vietnam, covert operations, regime change) but the ideal is clean. It asks the listener to grade policy on intentions and national myth, not on outcomes.

Context matters because Armey is a politician speaking inside the gravitational pull of post-Cold War American power and, later, the post-9/11 security state. In those moments, leaders needed to sell force abroad without sounding imperial at home. So the rhetoric builds a moral perimeter around the United States while reserving the right to define provocation. It’s less a statement about what America will do than about how America wants its actions to be narrated: always reluctant, always justified, always consistent with the story it tells about itself.