Politics & Power Quote by Christiane Amanpour

There’s a quiet judo move in Amanpour’s phrasing: she claims distance in order to make her admiration sound harder-won, and therefore more credible. “I’m not an American” is a disclaimer, but it’s also a credential. In a media climate where praise can look like patriotism-by-default and criticism can be dismissed as “anti-American,” she positions herself in the narrow lane of the outsider who isn’t obligated to flatter yet chooses to respect.

The key word is “outsiders’.” Not “my” respect, as if this is just personal sentiment, but a whole category of gaze: the world watching the United States as spectacle, superpower, and cultural export. That plural carries history: decades of American influence that has been both magnetic and bruising. Respect here isn’t starry-eyed devotion; it’s a recognition of scale and capacity, including the country’s self-mythologizing.

Then comes the double invocation: “the American people and the American way.” That’s deliberate triangulation. It separates citizens from the system while still linking them, allowing her to admire a civic temperament (energy, pluralism, reinvention) without signing off on every policy or administration. Coming from a war correspondent and global anchor, the line reads like a preemptive defense of journalistic legitimacy: you can scrutinize America precisely because you take it seriously.

The subtext is a rebuke to tribal media reflexes. Amanpour is insisting that critique and respect aren’t opposites; they’re the two parts of paying attention to a country that wants to be seen as exceptional and is, in fact, consequential.