Politics & Power Quote by Lee H. Hamilton

Hamilton’s line is a quietly radical reframing of poverty: not as a charity case, but as a strategic variable. By putting “national security policy” and “our conscience” in the same sentence, he collapses a moral argument and a hard-nosed geopolitical one into a single demand for attention. The move is deliberate. Conscience alone can be waved off as sentimental. Security alone can be treated as technocratic. Paired, they corner the reader: if you care about values, you should act; if you care about interests, you also have to act.

The statistic does most of the rhetorical work. “One half” is blunt and destabilizing; it turns inequality from an abstract problem into a planetary condition. “Less than two dollars a day” is chosen for its humiliating concreteness, a number that evokes hunger and fragility without spelling out a single image. Hamilton’s intent is to make the distant poor feel less distant, not by emotional storytelling but by invoking consequences: instability, disease, migration pressures, radicalization, failed states. He’s speaking in the post-Cold War register that broadened “security” beyond tanks and treaties, when policymakers began arguing that globalization tied American safety to global welfare.

The subtext is also domestic: a warning against the political convenience of ignoring the world’s bottom half. Hamilton suggests that indifference isn’t neutral; it’s a risk posture. The sentence reads like a budget argument in moral clothing, or a moral argument in budget clothing, built to survive Washington’s allergy to pure altruism.