Daily Inspiration Quote by Lloyd Cutler

The line lands like a courtroom aside that accidentally indicts the whole system. Lloyd Cutler, a lawyer who spent real time around Washington’s levers, isn’t waxing poetic about bureaucratic malaise; he’s doing something more cutting: reducing the mythology of “statecraft” to an institutional nullity. “In the end” signals not a momentary failure but a settled verdict after process, meetings, cables, and the ornamental choreography of consultation. The Foreign Ministry exists, speaks, perhaps even “objects,” and still arrives at the same destination: irrelevance.

The subtext is about where power actually lives. Cutler’s phrasing suggests a government in which foreign policy is formally housed in one place and operationally decided somewhere else - the head of government, the military, intelligence services, a tight political circle. Calling it “no power at all” isn’t just exaggeration; it’s an argument that the ministry’s role is to launder decisions made offstage into something that looks like procedure. Diplomacy becomes set dressing: the institution that absorbs blame, supplies talking points, and gives other countries the comforting illusion that there’s a rational channel to influence.

Context matters because this is the kind of conclusion you reach after watching policy failures up close: crises where expertise is overridden, long-term strategy loses to domestic politics, and “interagency process” becomes a polite term for being outgunned. Coming from a lawyer, it’s also a warning about accountability. If the official organ of foreign relations has no agency, then responsibility is deliberately hard to pin down - and that, in Washington, is often the point.