Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Chirac

Chirac is doing the statesman’s version of calling someone’s bluff: if you build a shield, you invite a bigger sword. The phrasing matters. “Retrigger” implies this isn’t a new danger so much as a sleeping one, the kind arms-control diplomats spent the 1990s trying to keep dormant after the Cold War. National Missile Defense, in his telling, doesn’t merely protect; it destabilizes by rewriting everyone else’s incentives. If one power pursues invulnerability, rivals don’t politely accept their new vulnerability - they multiply warheads, diversify delivery systems, or lean harder on nuclear posture to restore credibility.

His language is deliberately clinical but morally framed. “Of a nature to” is bureaucratic restraint, a way to sound measured while delivering a strong accusation: the project is structurally escalation-prone, regardless of intentions. Then he switches register: “Everything that goes in the direction of proliferation is a bad direction.” It’s blunt, almost parental, and that simplicity is strategic. Chirac collapses a complex technical debate (interceptors, trajectories, limited vs. robust defenses) into a single principle meant to be unassailable in European political culture: proliferation is the original sin.

The context is late-1990s/early-2000s transatlantic friction as the U.S. debated missile defense and the ABM Treaty’s constraints. France’s Gaullist reflex - guard strategic stability, resist American unilateral moves, protect multilateral arms-control norms - sits just under the surface. The subtext reads as a warning: missile defense isn’t just hardware; it’s a signal that the rules are optional, and once that signal is sent, other capitals will answer in kind.