Politics & Power Quote by George W. Bush

A rare moment when a Bush-era talking point accidentally tells the whole story. The line tries to frame an obvious problem - American dependence on foreign oil - as a matter of national vulnerability, the kind of plainspoken alarm that can justify big policy moves. The intent is pragmatic and political: name the dependency, signal seriousness, and clear space for an agenda that could range from drilling to efficiency to alternative energy, all under the patriotic banner of “security.”

But the subtext is where it bites. “Big foreign oil” isn’t a standard phrase; it awkwardly fuses two villains into one: the multinational oil industry (“big oil”) and geopolitically risky suppliers (“foreign”). That blend is rhetorically useful because it lets the speaker sound tough on corporate power and on overseas dependency without actually picking a fight with either. It points to a culprit while keeping the policy options flexible - and the donors unoffended.

Context matters: early 2000s America, post-9/11 security politics, wars in the Middle East, volatile prices, and a growing awareness that the U.S. was importing a significant share of its petroleum. “More and more of our imports come from overseas” is also a famously circular slip, but it reveals something real about the messaging: the administration needed energy independence to be a felt idea, not a technical chart. The sentence works because it translates a sprawling, global supply chain into a simple anxiety: we’re exposed, and someone else has leverage.