Politics & Power Quote by J. William Fulbright

Fulbright’s line lands like a warning flare over the self-esteem of empires: the moment a country baptizes its ambitions as “mission,” it stops treating power as a question and starts treating it as proof. The key move is “easily assumes.” He’s not describing a rare fever but a predictable mental shortcut, a national version of confirmation bias. Belief in moral purpose becomes retroactive justification for capacity. If we are chosen, then we must be able; if we must, then we may.

The subtext is aimed at the seductive merger of righteousness and logistics. “Means” isn’t just weapons and money; it’s also the presumed competence to reorder other people’s lives. Fulbright, a politician who helped midwife American postwar internationalism and later became one of the most prominent critics of Vietnam, understood how quickly moral language can launder strategic interests. “God’s work” is deliberately barbed: it exposes how civic religion turns foreign policy into a sermon, where dissent reads as heresy and skepticism looks unpatriotic.

Context matters because Fulbright is speaking from inside the machine. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he watched executive power expand behind a halo of Cold War necessity. His sentence is compact because it’s diagnosing a pattern: mission-talk shrinks the space for democratic argument. Once duty is declared sacred, costs become secondary, collateral damage becomes regrettable but ordained, and limits sound like betrayal. The brilliance here is that he doesn’t argue against ideals; he argues against what ideals do when they become a mandate.