Politics & Power Quote by Michael Scheuer

Scheuer’s line is built like a trap door: it yanks the listener away from the comforting moral binary of “war vs. peace” and drops them into a bleaker, bureaucratic reality where the real menu is “war vs. endless war.” That framing isn’t accidental; it’s a hard reset of the terms of debate. By insisting peace isn’t actually on offer, he implies the post-9/11 security posture has become self-perpetuating - an engine that generates its own justification, budgets, and enemies.

The move that follows is even more pointed. He anticipates the reflexive attack word, “appeasement,” and preemptively disarms it. In American political culture, appeasement is less an argument than a moral verdict, a shorthand for cowardice. Scheuer tries to deny critics that easy leverage by swapping moral language for transactional language: “American self-interest.” It’s a pivot from virtue to utility, from patriotism-as-purity to patriotism-as-cost-benefit analysis.

The subtext is a rebuke to the politics of permanent emergency. If the choice is endless war, then slogans about resolve and toughness start to look like branding for an open-ended project with no exit criteria. He’s also quietly indicting Washington’s incentive structure: calling something “self-interest” makes it sound pragmatic, but it also admits that ideals have been folded into strategy - and that strategy has metastasized.

Contextually, this is the voice of an insider arguing that the most “pro-American” position may be the one that reduces blowback, drains the logic of recruitment, and treats war not as a posture but as a policy with a measurable end.