War & Peace Quote by Jim Sasser

Diplomacy dressed up as a warning label: beware the self-fulfilling prophecy. Jim Sasser’s line isn’t trying to romanticize China or scold “toughness.” It’s pointing at a basic political mechanism that Washington often pretends is optional: states respond to the posture you project. If you build policy around suspicion, you don’t merely anticipate hostility - you manufacture incentives for it.

The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost folksy, which is part of the move. “Treat” is the key verb: it frames geopolitics as a pattern of everyday interaction, where assumptions harden into habits. Call someone an enemy often enough, and you create bureaucracies, budgets, alliances, and domestic narratives that require an enemy to justify themselves. The “much better chance” clause carries a politician’s pragmatic cadence: not moralizing, just probability. He’s selling risk management, not idealism.

Subtext: American power isn’t just military; it’s performative. Labeling China an enemy signals to Beijing that cooperation is politically unrewarding and strategically unsafe, nudging it toward counter-balancing, technological decoupling, and nationalist consolidation. It also signals to U.S. voters that compromise is appeasement, narrowing policymakers’ room to maneuver. Sasser is quietly indicting how domestic politics can hijack foreign policy: once China is cast as the villain, leaders get punished for treating it like a complicated counterpart.

Contextually, this fits the post-Cold War and early post-Tiananmen arc when U.S. elites debated “engagement” versus containment. The quote argues that engagement isn’t naivete; it’s an attempt to avoid locking both countries into a scripted rivalry that becomes harder, costlier, and eventually automatic.