Success Quote by Conrad Black

It lands like a denial that knows it’s being overheard. “I don’t go around trying to stir up foreign wars” is phrased as modesty, but it’s really a boundary-drawing move: I’m not that kind of power. Coming from Conrad Black, a businessman whose influence has historically flowed through media, money, and elite networks rather than ballots, the line plays defense against a very modern suspicion: that unelected actors can tilt public life as decisively as governments do.

The verb choice is doing quiet work. “Go around” suggests childish meddling or a roving troublemaker, reducing the machinery of influence to something almost slapstick. “Trying” lowers culpability even further: intention is foregrounded so outcomes can be shrugged off. The subtext is less “I have no influence” than “If influence exists, it’s incidental.” That’s a familiar posture in boardrooms and op-ed pages alike, where power is often presented as mere opinion, investment, or “engagement.”

Then there’s the scale. “Foreign wars” is maximal, almost cartoonishly grand, which makes the denial feel safer: most people don’t accuse businessmen of personally lighting the fuse. But that exaggeration can boomerang. By jumping to the most extreme charge, Black implicitly acknowledges the broader category of concern: agenda-setting, lobbying, media framing, the soft pressure that primes a public for conflict without ever “stirring” anything directly.

The line’s intent is reputational triage. It asks the listener to see him as a participant in debate, not an architect of catastrophe, even as it reveals how closely those roles now rub shoulders.