Politics & Power Quote by Huston Smith

What makes Huston Smith’s line land is how calmly it treats an unthinkable possibility: that U.S. foreign policy might be tethered not just to votes, strategy, or ideology, but to apocalypse-as-timetable. Smith starts from a familiar, almost comforting cynicism - “political reasons” - the sort of explanation adults reach for when confronted with morally rigid alliances. Then he pivots to something darker and stranger: maybe the rigidity isn’t instrumental at all. Maybe it’s devotional.

The quote’s force comes from its restraint. Smith doesn’t accuse Bush outright of acting on end-times belief; he leaves it suspended in a single, chilling conditional. “I do not know” is doing rhetorical work: it’s a theologian’s caution, but it also functions like an alarm bell. The admission of uncertainty keeps the claim from reading like conspiracy and instead frames it as a live question in a political culture where Christian Zionism and prophetic readings of the Middle East had real traction in the early 2000s, especially in the orbit of the Iraq War and the second intifada.

There’s also an implied critique of Sharon as symbol: not merely a leader but a node in an American story about Israel that blends security, guilt, biblical narrative, and domestic coalition-building. Smith’s subtext is that when policy becomes “seemingly inflexible,” it begins to resemble faith - immune to evidence, insulated from consequence. If that faith is eschatological, the stakes aren’t just diplomatic. They’re cosmic, which is precisely why the line unsettles.