Leadership Quote by Mike Johanns

There is a whole worldview packed into the bureaucratic blandness of that line: American power, recast as a “presence,” exported through the safest-sounding acronym in Washington. Mike Johanns isn’t talking about troops or embassies; he’s talking about USDA staff abroad. But the phrasing borrows the posture of geopolitics. “In 75 foreign countries” lands like a flex, a number meant to impress appropriators back home and signal competence to industry stakeholders. The punchline is the pivot: not “in the State Department” or “in the military,” but “in the USDA.” It’s soft power with a farm-belt accent.

The intent is defensive and promotional at once. In an era when globalization is contested, Johanns frames agricultural outreach as both routine and essential: we’re already out there, quietly doing the work. The subtext is that trade isn’t abstract policy; it’s placement, relationships, inspectors, market access negotiations, and the mundane machinery that makes U.S. exports feel inevitable. Saying “we have a presence” also avoids naming what that presence does: pushing American standards, prying open markets, shaping diets, stabilizing commodity flows. It’s influence without the word.

Context matters: Johanns, as a former Secretary of Agriculture and a Midwestern Republican, is speaking to constituencies that see international engagement through the lens of jobs, prices, and competitiveness, not cosmopolitan ideals. The line sells global reach without sounding globalist. It reassures Americans that the country can project itself abroad under the benign banner of food - even as it signals that agriculture is, and has always been, a front line of national interest.