Success Quote by Chris Van Hollen

There is a politician’s sleight of hand in the phrase “great division in the world”: it sounds like diagnosis, but it’s really an alibi. Van Hollen is talking about Afghanistan and al Qaeda, yet he opens with a global mood statement, as if the war’s unfinished business is less about strategy than about a lost moment of consensus. The key move is the contrast between “division” now and “that unity” then. He’s invoking the post-9/11 political truce without naming it, hoping the audience supplies the memory: a brief period when dissent was muted and budgets, authorities, and wars moved fast.

“Failed to capitalize” is the tell. It frames unity as a resource to be spent, not a democratic condition to be argued through. The verb choice nudges responsibility away from specific decisions (mission creep, shifting objectives, nation-building, the Iraq diversion) and toward an abstract missed opportunity. “Finish the job” borrows the tidy rhetoric of competence - a project that simply needs completion - while sidestepping the reality that the “job” kept changing depending on who was in office and what counted as victory.

The subtext is coalition management at home. By blaming “division,” he implicitly critiques partisan paralysis and warns against withdrawal or drift, but he also laundered the hard question: if unity was so strong, why wasn’t the outcome? It’s a forward-facing line meant to re-legitimize commitment by recasting the past as squandered consensus rather than contested war.