Politics & Power Quote by Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

“Swallowing up” is a deliberately visceral phrase: not conquest as chess move, but as predation. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a patrician Cold War politician who served as a U.S. ambassador at the UN, is doing more than blessing an institution. He’s laying down terms for what legitimacy should look like in the post-World War II order: sovereignty is fragile, and the threats to it are increasingly sneaky.

The line works because it widens the indictment beyond the obvious villain. “Armies with banners” evokes the clean, old-fashioned invasion everyone agrees to condemn. Then Lodge pivots to the messier repertoire: “force or fraud,” “tricks,” “midnight treachery.” That’s the real brief. He’s insisting the United Nations must be “potent” not only against tanks crossing borders, but against subversion, proxy takeovers, and political capture - the kind of aggression that can be plausibly denied while it happens. The repetition (“any nation, at any time, by any means”) is legalistic in cadence, like a treaty clause, but it’s also propaganda-savvy: a moral universal that conveniently matches America’s strategic anxieties.

Context matters: Lodge’s generation watched the League of Nations fail, saw appeasement collapse into total war, then entered a bipolar world where “fraud” could mean rigged elections, planted parties, covert action, or economic coercion. The subtext is a demand that the UN not become a talking shop - and a warning that passivity is complicity. It’s idealism with an edge: collective security, yes, but armed with suspicion.