Daily Inspiration Quote by Brent Scowcroft

There is a diplomat's steel inside this seemingly evenhanded warning: chaos in Iraq is not a regional tragedy, it is a bill that gets forwarded. Scowcroft, the archetypal national security insider, isn not moralizing about intervention; he is selling interdependence to audiences that would prefer to treat the Middle East as someone else's weather system. The sentence is engineered to make distance feel like negligence.

The intent is practical and political. By naming "the Europeans", Scowcroft widens the circle of accountability beyond Washington while quietly pressuring European capitals to stop free-riding on American risk. It is also a leash on U.S. impulses: if the costs diffuse across allies, then the U.S. cannot pretend it can unilaterally manage the fallout. "Just as much as we would" is the rhetorical twist. It rejects the flattering myth that America is uniquely burdened - and it spares Europeans the comforting myth that they are insulated.

The subtext is about the post-9/11 debate over Iraq: interventionists talked in terms of transforming the region; Scowcroft talks like a manager of second-order consequences. Chaos means refugees, terrorism networks, energy shocks, sectarian spillover - all of which hit Europe quickly through geography and politics. It's also a subtle argument for coalition discipline: if the downside is shared, legitimacy and planning must be shared too. This is Scowcroft doing what he did best, deflating crusades with arithmetic.