Politics & Power Quote by John Foster Dulles

Dulles’ line reads like common sense, which is exactly why it’s effective - and why it’s slippery. “Of all tasks” doesn’t argue policy so much as rank morality: everything else a government might do becomes optional, even indulgent, once “protect” is crowned the baseline. The phrasing is bluntly paternal. Citizens are cast less as participants in a shared project than as people to be shielded, with the state positioned as the one legitimate manager of force.

The subtext is Cold War realism in a suit. Dulles helped architect a foreign policy built around containment, alliances, and credible threat. In that world, “violence” isn’t only street crime; it’s invasion, insurgency, sabotage, coups, nuclear blackmail. By using a broad word, he creates a single category that can hold Soviet tanks, domestic unrest, and colonial upheaval alike. That elasticity is strategic: it makes extraordinary measures feel like maintenance of the basics.

The quote also smuggles in a quiet tradeoff. If protection is the most basic duty, dissent can be recoded as risk, and civil liberties as luxuries that must yield when danger rises. Mid-century America knew that logic well, from McCarthy-era suspicion at home to intervention abroad justified as preventing worse violence later.

What makes the sentence work is its moral asymmetry: no one wants to argue against safety. Dulles turns that impulse into a hierarchy of governance, a rhetorical bridge from “security” to “whatever security requires.”