"If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job"
About this Quote
Impatience is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting here. Susan George isn’t politely “urging multilateralism”; she’s puncturing a familiar alibi: the idea that global action must wait for Washington’s green light. The line turns U.S. leadership from presumed inevitability into an obstacle, framing American delay not as an unfortunate hiccup but as a predictable feature. “We will be waiting for a very long time” is a weaponized shrug, a way of breaking the spell of superpower centrality.
The subtext is strategic, not just scolding. George shifts responsibility onto a broader cast - “Europe,” “Australia,” and “other developed and middle developing countries” - and in doing so, she redraws the map of agency. This is coalition-building language, designed to make readers in affluent democracies feel implicated rather than merely sympathetic. The phrase “have got to do the job” carries the blunt moral math of activism: if you benefit from the system, you don’t get to outsource the repair work to the most reluctant player.
Context matters: George’s career is rooted in critiques of debt regimes, trade policy, and the architecture of globalization - arenas where U.S. power is outsized and often defended as realism. Her quote flips “realism” into a call for bypass. It also anticipates a recurring 21st-century pattern: American domestic politics as a global choke point, especially on climate, war, and regulation. The intent is to de-center the U.S. without pretending the U.S. doesn’t matter - a distinction activists make when they’re done asking and ready to organize.
The subtext is strategic, not just scolding. George shifts responsibility onto a broader cast - “Europe,” “Australia,” and “other developed and middle developing countries” - and in doing so, she redraws the map of agency. This is coalition-building language, designed to make readers in affluent democracies feel implicated rather than merely sympathetic. The phrase “have got to do the job” carries the blunt moral math of activism: if you benefit from the system, you don’t get to outsource the repair work to the most reluctant player.
Context matters: George’s career is rooted in critiques of debt regimes, trade policy, and the architecture of globalization - arenas where U.S. power is outsized and often defended as realism. Her quote flips “realism” into a call for bypass. It also anticipates a recurring 21st-century pattern: American domestic politics as a global choke point, especially on climate, war, and regulation. The intent is to de-center the U.S. without pretending the U.S. doesn’t matter - a distinction activists make when they’re done asking and ready to organize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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