Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Sulzberger’s sentence is built like a wary glance: it doesn’t denounce “movements” outright, it distrusts the kind that smuggle a transformation in under a noble label. The key phrase is “peacemaker among nations,” a lofty role that implies arbitration, restraint, and credibility earned by not seeming owned by any single flag. Against that, “merely a national warrior” lands with a dull thud of demotion. The adverb “merely” is doing ruthless work: it strips away the romance of martial virtue and reduces war-making to parochial reflex.

As a publisher, Sulzberger is speaking from the pressure point where public opinion gets shaped and organized. His intent is less pacifist than procedural: he’s defending the conditions under which peace has a chance to be persuasive. A country that wants to mediate has to look like it can criticize its own side, or at least resist becoming its side’s loudest instrument. “Any movement” is a warning about mass politics, the kind that turns international responsibility into domestic performance.

The subtext is about propaganda and the emotional economy of nationalism. Movements don’t just argue; they recruit. They convert complex foreign policy into a story with heroes, enemies, and a moral permission slip. Sulzberger is suspicious of that permission slip because it collapses the distinction between safeguarding a nation and sanctifying its aggression.

Contextually, coming from a mid-20th-century American newspaper man, it reads as an anxiety about the U.S. being pulled from aspirational postwar leadership into crusading posture - where “peace” becomes branding, and war becomes the default proof of seriousness.