Politics & Power Quote by George Aiken

Aiken’s line reads like a folksy shrug, but it’s doing strategic work: it smuggles a foreign-policy worldview into plain moral arithmetic. By insisting that “people are people the world over,” he flattens ideology, religion, and nationality into character types - good, bad, greedy, generous - then scales that logic up to states. The move is disarmingly democratic: it rejects the idea that Americans are uniquely virtuous or that adversaries are uniquely monstrous. At the same time, it’s bracingly unsentimental. If nations “act the same way” as individuals, then expecting permanent gratitude, reliable altruism, or frictionless alliances is naive. Interests will behave like appetites.

The subtext is a warning against both crusading and romanticism. Moralizing foreign policy often requires caricatures: the enemy as pure evil, the ally as pure good, the home country as history’s protagonist. Aiken’s framing undercuts that, suggesting that virtue and vice are distributed everywhere, and that power - like personality - can be petty, generous, or predatory depending on circumstances. It’s a small sentence with an anti-messianic edge.

Context matters because Aiken was a mid-century Republican senator from Vermont, a period when America was learning (and relearning) that global leadership is less a parade than a grind: war, early Cold War realities, decolonization, shifting alliances. The quote functions as pragmatic ballast. It makes room for negotiation, caution, and skepticism toward grand narratives, while still leaving space for moral judgment. It’s realism without the swagger: a reminder that states aren’t abstractions; they’re human behavior with a flag.