Politics & Power Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Kellogg is puncturing a comforting fantasy: that weapons can be accumulated like insurance policies and never filed as claims. The line “It is idle” is doing real work. It’s a brusque dismissal of the genteel, technocratic argument that arms races are stabilizing, that competition in steel and shells is a kind of harmless industrial sport. He doesn’t entertain that premise; he brands it as unserious, almost childish.

The sentence structure moves like a prosecutor’s brief. First, the naïve claim; then the counterweight: “History demonstrates the contrary.” Not theory, not ideology, not prophecy - precedent. And when he says “the last war,” he’s invoking a shared trauma that, in the 1920s, hardly needed naming. World War I is treated as recent evidence in a courtroom, not as distant tragedy. The phrase “appalling effect” keeps the horror deliberately unspecific, because the audience already carries the images: trenches, gas, mass casualty lists, shattered economies.

The subtext is political as much as moral. Kellogg is arguing against the idea that deterrence can be trusted to manage nationalist pride and industrial lobbying. “Competing in great armaments” isn’t just about security; it’s about status, domestic jobs, and the seductive optics of readiness. His warning suggests that once nations define strength as accumulation, they also create pressure to justify that accumulation. Stockpiles demand a narrative, and narratives, in moments of crisis, can become permission slips.

Contextually, this fits a statesman’s attempt to sell disarmament as realism, not idealism - a key move for an era trying, anxiously, to legislate peace after having industrialized war.