"Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing"
About this Quote
"Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing" is a statesman’s nightmare compressed into a single maritime image: history as water, politics as sandbags, and agency as something you either seize early or lose forever. Sharett isn’t describing a policy problem; he’s warning about a point of no return, the moment when events stop being managed and start managing you.
The genius of "return tide" is its fatalism-with-a-clock. Tides are natural, predictable, and indifferent to human pleading. By choosing that metaphor, Sharett frames the coming shift as both inevitable and timed: you can act before it turns, but not after it gathers momentum. "Stem it" quietly concedes the limits of power even for people who usually speak in the language of control. The line also performs a kind of political discipline. It is built to stiffen spines, to justify preemption, and to make hesitation look not merely mistaken but suicidal.
Sharett’s era was defined by demographic pressure, border anxiety, international scrutiny, and the constant fear that one concession would become precedent. Read in that context, "our undoing" is less melodrama than a strategic forecast: once a reversal begins - in migration patterns, territorial claims, diplomatic legitimacy, or internal cohesion - it won’t arrive as a single catastrophe. It will arrive as a flood of small, irreversible shifts that retrospectively make early caution look like the last moment of freedom.
The genius of "return tide" is its fatalism-with-a-clock. Tides are natural, predictable, and indifferent to human pleading. By choosing that metaphor, Sharett frames the coming shift as both inevitable and timed: you can act before it turns, but not after it gathers momentum. "Stem it" quietly concedes the limits of power even for people who usually speak in the language of control. The line also performs a kind of political discipline. It is built to stiffen spines, to justify preemption, and to make hesitation look not merely mistaken but suicidal.
Sharett’s era was defined by demographic pressure, border anxiety, international scrutiny, and the constant fear that one concession would become precedent. Read in that context, "our undoing" is less melodrama than a strategic forecast: once a reversal begins - in migration patterns, territorial claims, diplomatic legitimacy, or internal cohesion - it won’t arrive as a single catastrophe. It will arrive as a flood of small, irreversible shifts that retrospectively make early caution look like the last moment of freedom.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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