Leadership Quote by Jon Huntsman, Jr.

The sentence is a politician’s tightrope act: acknowledge the cost of American power without assigning blame to any one administration, any one war, any one voter. Huntsman’s opening clause, “It’s taken a lot of presidents,” spreads responsibility across decades, turning what could be an indictment into a kind of institutional shrug. The passive architecture matters. “Get us where we are today” avoids naming where “here” actually is - quagmire, global reach, fatigue, or mere complexity - letting listeners project their preferred diagnosis.

The piling-on of nouns does the rhetorical work. “Deployments… wars… engagements” is a deliberate escalation that also softens. “Wars” is morally loud; “engagements” is bureaucratically quiet, the Pentagon’s favorite euphemism for violence that won’t fit neatly on a headline. By stacking them, Huntsman signals seriousness while keeping the language elastic enough to avoid alienating hawks or doves. It’s critique with an escape hatch.

Then there’s the almost-comic trailing off: “You add them all up.” That’s the subtextual pivot from emotion to accounting. The suffering becomes a ledger, an implied audit of strategy and outcomes. It hints at pragmatism - a manager’s sensibility - and invites the audience to see foreign policy not as a crusade but as cumulative, expensive, and inherited. Contextually, it fits a post-Iraq/Afghanistan era when candidates wanted to sound sober about intervention without sounding isolationist. The point isn’t to relitigate a single decision; it’s to argue that the system, over time, has produced “today,” and therefore “today” demands a different kind of judgment.