Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Feith

Feith’s line is the kind of bureaucratic reassurance that doubles as a preemptive alibi. Spoken by a senior Pentagon official in the post-9/11 era, it reads like an inoculation against the most predictable criticism of the Bush administration’s national-security posture: that “coalitions” were being treated as optional accessories rather than strategic constraints.

The specific intent is to frame American power as collaborative without surrendering American control. “Our concept” is doing quiet work here. It signals doctrine, not mood; a plan, not a preference. And the phrasing “operate alone or by itself” is conspicuously redundant, the way officials speak when they want to close every loophole for headlines. It’s not poetry, it’s message discipline: don’t call it unilateralism.

The subtext is more revealing. By separating “world affairs” from “military affairs,” Feith acknowledges where the real anxiety lives. Diplomacy can be multilateral in tone while war remains American-led in practice. This is the rhetorical move that allows an administration to argue it welcomes partners even as it reserves the right to move without them. “Not alone” can mean anything from full UN authorization to a “coalition of the willing” assembled after the decision is already made.

Context makes the sentence land harder: the early 2000s debate over Iraq, preemption, and legitimacy. Feith isn’t just describing cooperation; he’s managing the optics of dominance, translating a superpower’s freedom of action into language that sounds like shared burden rather than sovereign impulse.