Life & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Korb

Korb’s line is a grenade lobbed into the polite fiction of foreign policy: that interventions are about principle, stability, or the rules-based order. By swapping oil for carrots, he exposes the commodity logic that often sits behind lofty rhetoric. Carrots are deliberately mundane. They signal “nothing strategic here,” no energy chokepoint, no global market panic, no corporate constituency with lobbyists and talking points ready to go. The joke is built on the brutal honesty of an if-then statement: change the resource, change the moral urgency.

The intent is less to sneer at Kuwait than to indict the decision-making machinery in Washington. It’s a scalpel aimed at selective empathy. When leaders describe wars as necessary to defend freedom or resist aggression, Korb implies those ideals are frequently rented language, useful for selling the public on a choice already made for material reasons. The subtext is that national outrage is not purely organic; it can be engineered when stakes align with power and profit.

Context matters: the line lands in the shadow of the Gulf War era, when Kuwait’s invasion was framed as an intolerable violation of sovereignty. Korb’s remark doesn’t argue Iraq’s aggression was acceptable; it argues that acceptability was never the real threshold. The threshold was strategic value. That’s why the quote endures: it compresses a complex critique of resource-driven interventionism into one agricultural punchline, making the cynicism impossible to unhear the next time a conflict is wrapped in ideals.