"I don't think that anybody should be ruling in or ruling out anything while we are conducting diplomacy"
About this Quote
A sentence like this is designed to sound like restraint while quietly expanding room to maneuver. Douglas Feith’s “I don’t think that anybody should be ruling in or ruling out anything” wraps a hard-edged principle of power politics in the soft packaging of process. The key move is the double negative: it doesn’t commit to a course, it commits to keeping every course on the table. In Washington, that’s not neutrality; it’s leverage.
The phrasing also deputizes ambiguity. “Anybody” spreads responsibility across the whole system, pre-emptively warning off legislators, allies, skeptical bureaucrats, and even the press from demanding clarity. It’s less an invitation to open-mindedness than a boundary-setting move: don’t force our hand, don’t box us in, don’t make us pay the political price of specificity.
As diplomatic rhetoric, it functions as a pressure tactic aimed at multiple audiences. To an adversary, it implies: concede now, because the alternative remains available. To domestic stakeholders, it signals seriousness without revealing costs. The word “diplomacy” is doing reputational work, laundering coercive possibility through a respectable label; the insistence on not “ruling out” implicitly legitimizes escalation while still claiming the moral high ground of negotiation.
Feith’s career context - a senior defense official in an era when “diplomacy” often ran parallel to military planning - makes the line feel less like patient statecraft and more like strategic hedging. The intent isn’t to preserve peace so much as to preserve options, and to make the absence of commitment sound like prudence rather than calculation.
The phrasing also deputizes ambiguity. “Anybody” spreads responsibility across the whole system, pre-emptively warning off legislators, allies, skeptical bureaucrats, and even the press from demanding clarity. It’s less an invitation to open-mindedness than a boundary-setting move: don’t force our hand, don’t box us in, don’t make us pay the political price of specificity.
As diplomatic rhetoric, it functions as a pressure tactic aimed at multiple audiences. To an adversary, it implies: concede now, because the alternative remains available. To domestic stakeholders, it signals seriousness without revealing costs. The word “diplomacy” is doing reputational work, laundering coercive possibility through a respectable label; the insistence on not “ruling out” implicitly legitimizes escalation while still claiming the moral high ground of negotiation.
Feith’s career context - a senior defense official in an era when “diplomacy” often ran parallel to military planning - makes the line feel less like patient statecraft and more like strategic hedging. The intent isn’t to preserve peace so much as to preserve options, and to make the absence of commitment sound like prudence rather than calculation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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