Leadership Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Brzezinski’s line works because it refuses the moral shortcut that policymaking loves most: treating condemnation as carte blanche. He opens with an explicit “yes” to rejecting Palestinian terrorism, not as throat-clearing but as preemptive disarmament. He’s signaling: I accept the baseline moral premise; don’t try to disqualify what comes next as soft on violence. That rhetorical move clears space for the real target of the quote: how democracies (and their allies) launder hard power through the language of security.

The pivot on “But” is the engine. “Defacto” is doing quiet work, accusing leaders of pretending their choices are accidental or inevitable rather than deliberate. In his framing, terrorism becomes the convenient alibi that turns emergency measures into a standing political program: “increasingly brutal repression,” “colonial settlements,” “a new wall.” The list is calibrated to escalate from tactics (repression) to structure (settlements) to symbol (the wall). He’s not just saying the response is excessive; he’s arguing it’s transformative, converting a conflict into a territorial project with permanent architecture.

Context matters: Brzezinski comes out of the Cold War national security establishment, a world where “security” rhetoric is often less a shield than a solvent, dissolving ethical limits and long-term strategy alike. The subtext is strategic as much as moral: repression and settlement expansion don’t neutralize extremism; they incubate it, outsourcing tomorrow’s instability to today’s applause. His intent is to separate legitimate self-defense from policies that harden occupation into destiny.