War & Peace Quote by Bob Hawke

Hawke’s line lands with the blunt moral certainty of a leader who’s decided that the usual evasions of statecraft aren’t worth the trouble. “Intrinsically wrong” is doing heavy lifting: it’s not a claim that the war was mismanaged or poorly sold, but that it was rotten at the core. In one adjective, he denies the comforting escape hatch of “good intentions” and pushes the debate out of tactics and into legitimacy.

The second move is even sharper. By tying morality to outcomes - “as a result of our participation” - Hawke refuses the standard trade-off politicians lean on, where ethical discomfort is soothed by promised security benefits. He argues the opposite: participation didn’t purchase safety; it compounded risk. The phrasing “haven’t improved” reads almost judicial, as if he’s tallying evidence against a policy that was marketed as prudent alliance management.

The subtext is about Australia’s posture in the world: a middle power often tempted to equate loyalty to larger partners with national interest. Hawke is prying those two apart. He’s also speaking to the domestic aftershock of modern wars - radicalization, backlash, surveillance creep, social fracture - the idea that conflict abroad has a way of importing insecurity back home.

Context matters here: Hawke is an emblem of pragmatic Labor realism, not an instinctive protest politician. That’s why the critique carries weight. It’s not anti-war as identity; it’s anti-war as sober audit: the moral cost was real, and the strategic payoff was a mirage.