Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence Eagleburger

A diplomat doesn’t usually praise a “best of all worlds” fantasy unless he’s sharpening a knife. Eagleburger’s line borrows the rosy cadence of utopian thinking to sell something more hard-nosed: a redefinition of embassy life around commerce. The wit is in the mismatch. Embassies are imagined as temples of geopolitics and protocol; he drags them down to the showroom floor, where the national interest is measured in contracts and shipments.

The specific intent is managerial and doctrinal. Eagleburger is signaling to career Foreign Service officers that trade promotion isn’t a side hustle reserved for commercial attaches; it’s the organizing principle. “Everyone” is the tell: no bureaucratic exemptions, no old-world separation between “real diplomacy” and the grubby work of helping Boeing, Caterpillar, or a midwestern agriculture exporter navigate local gatekeepers. It’s also a quiet shot at embassy cultures that reward cable-writing and cocktail-circuit fluency more than outcome-driven problem-solving.

Subtextually, the quote treats exports as a proxy for American power and legitimacy. In the late Cold War and post-Cold War mindset that shaped Eagleburger’s generation, economic strength wasn’t just prosperity at home; it was leverage abroad, an answer to rivals, and a way to bind allies through interdependence. That’s why the line works rhetorically: it collapses the abstract (“national security,” “relationships”) into a concrete, measurable deliverable. The “best of all worlds” isn’t naïve optimism; it’s a norm-setting dare. If your daily work can’t plausibly connect to U.S. exports, what exactly are you doing there?