War & Peace Quote by William Kunstler

Kunstler is describing a nation that learned, almost overnight, that foreign policy doesn’t stay “over there.” Nixon’s 1970 move into Cambodia detonated a fuse already burning on U.S. campuses, and Kunstler frames the reaction in deliberately warlike terms: “troops,” “civil war,” “up in arms.” The point isn’t just that students were angry; it’s that the state’s violence abroad was being mirrored by a sense of impending violence at home. He’s collapsing the distance between battlefield and quad to argue that Cambodia made the U.S. itself feel occupied.

The grammar does some work, too. “Were on the verge” gives the panic a crowded, breathless momentum, like he’s replaying a moment when the country’s political temperature spiked faster than its institutions could respond. “Many closed down” is clipped and factual, as if to suggest administrators didn’t so much choose as surrender. When he says “real problems,” the understatement is strategic. Coming from Kunstler - a movement lawyer who defended dissidents and treated the courtroom as a political stage - “real problems” is code for legitimacy crises: strikes, clashes with police, radicalization, and the fear that normal governance was slipping.

Context sharpens the stakes. The Cambodia escalation helped trigger the nationwide student strike and the Kent State and Jackson State killings. Kunstler’s intent is to remind listeners that the backlash wasn’t a youthful tantrum; it was a constitutional stress test. His subtext: when a government expands war under the banner of order, it may end up importing disorder - and calling it security.