Politics & Power Quote by Jon Huntsman, Jr.

Huntsman’s line is a politician’s cleanest weapon: a demand for a “winning exit strategy” that sounds like common sense while quietly indicting the entire premise of open-ended war. The phrasing does double duty. “Define” signals technocratic competence, the language of briefings and metrics, but it’s also a trapdoor: if you can’t put the mission on paper in a way that’s legible to “the American people,” you don’t have a mission, you have drift.

The subtext is a rebuke to Washington’s habit of confusing activity with strategy. “Somehow come out ahead” is tellingly vague, the kind of phrase that acknowledges the public’s fatigue without litigating what “ahead” even means in counterinsurgency, nation-building, or deterrence. That ambiguity is the point: it lets Huntsman align himself with skepticism toward intervention without sounding isolationist. He’s not arguing against power; he’s arguing against waste.

Then he pivots hard to the ledger: “wasting our money” and “wasting our strategic resources.” Money is the populist register, the pocketbook case for voters who don’t want to bankroll endless deployments. “Strategic resources” is the insider register, aimed at defense hawks and foreign-policy realists worried about readiness, credibility, and the opportunity costs of being bogged down while other rivals move. The repetition of “wasting” does rhetorical policing: it frames prolonged conflict not as sacrifice or duty, but as mismanagement.

Contextually, it fits the post-Iraq, post-surge era when “mission accomplished” bravado had curdled into distrust. Huntsman is channeling that skepticism into a respectable, managerial critique: if victory can’t be explained and scheduled, it’s not resolve you’re asking for - it’s permission to lose slowly.