War & Peace Quote by John Hewson

The line has the clipped pragmatism of someone who’s watched victory get marketed as an ending rather than treated as a beginning. Hewson isn’t arguing about the righteousness of war; he’s quietly indicting the seductive political fantasy that war is a discrete event you can “win” and then walk away from. The repetition of “structure” does heavy lifting: it shifts the conversation from battlefield heroics to bureaucracy, legitimacy, and the unglamorous mechanics of governance. That’s where wars are truly decided in memory and in consequence.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial. If postwar planning is the measure, then leaders who treat the aftermath as an afterthought aren’t merely naïve - they’re culpable. “What you do after” implies a moral ledger: dismantle institutions recklessly and you don’t just inherit instability; you manufacture it. “How you make that structure work” is a subtle swipe at the tendency to impose systems on paper - constitutions, councils, timelines - without investing in the local trust, resources, and enforcement capacity that make any system real.

Contextually, coming from a politician formed in the late Cold War and post-Vietnam decades, it reads like an Australian-inflected warning about interventionism in the era of Iraq and Afghanistan: the real strategic challenge is state-building, not shock-and-awe. It’s also a political hedge. By focusing on “structure,” Hewson can critique war policy without sounding ideologically absolutist, claiming the mantle of competence. The power of the quote is that it demotes war from spectacle to systems test - and dares listeners to admit which part they’ve been skipping.