Politics & Power Quote by Chuck Hagel

Hagel is trying to flip the usual Washington complaint about allies: that treaties are handcuffs, partners are freeloaders, and multilateralism dilutes American sovereignty. His reframing is managerial and strategic: alliances are not charity and not moral decoration; they are force multipliers. The intent is to defend a cooperative foreign policy in language tough enough to satisfy hard-nosed realists while still nodding to the post-Cold War mission statement of spreading democracy.

The subtext is where the quote does its real work. “Expand our influence” quietly replaces “exercise our power,” suggesting dominance without sounding imperial. It’s an argument for legitimacy as a form of leverage: when the US acts through coalitions, it gains access, basing, intelligence, and political cover that raw unilateralism can’t buy. At the same time, he’s policing domestic politics. By insisting alliances are “a means,” he’s pre-empting isolationist moods and the perennial accusation that partners drag America into unnecessary wars.

Then comes the idealist chord: democracy and freedom “should be a shared interest.” That “should” is doing heavy lifting. It’s aspirational, not descriptive, and it glosses over the awkward fact that many US partners are not democracies, and many democracies don’t always share US priorities. Hagel’s move is classic establishment rhetoric: fuse values and interests so they seem inseparable, turning a contested project (democracy promotion) into a commonsense global good. In the post-9/11, NATO-and-coalitions era Hagel inhabited, this is less naive optimism than a bid to keep American primacy from looking like mere force.