Politics & Power Quote by George Ball

Ball’s line wraps a hard-nosed policy claim in the soft velvet of moral obligation. “Not only must Americans admire Israel” isn’t persuasion so much as social instruction: admiration is treated as a civic duty, not a conclusion one arrives at after weighing facts. The phrase “there can be no doubt” tries to foreclose debate before it starts, policing the boundaries of respectable opinion. It’s rhetoric designed to convert a contested foreign policy into a settled element of national identity.

The key move is the pivot from “interest” to “special responsibility.” “Interest” is the language of power: strategy, alliances, leverage. “Special responsibility” is the language of conscience, implying a parental or custodial role that can justify extraordinary commitments. Put together, they create a self-reinforcing logic: if supporting Israel is both morally required and strategically necessary, then any dissent can be dismissed as either naive about security or suspect about values.

Context matters because Ball was not a cheerleader by instinct. As a senior figure in the Johnson administration, he became known for resisting escalatory consensus thinking, especially on Vietnam, and he was wary of the romanticization that can drag the U.S. into open-ended obligations. Reading the quote with that backdrop, it works as a snapshot of mid-century American political speech: a moment when Israel is framed as “valiant,” a democracy under siege, and the U.S. relationship is cast less as a transactional alliance than as a test of American character. That framing doesn’t just argue for policy; it manufactures permanence.