War & Peace Quote by David Bruce

“Enlightened” is doing political heavy lifting here. David Bruce isn’t just praising postwar policy; he’s smuggling in a standard for what leadership should look like when a society is exhausted, victorious, and tempted by revenge or complacency. By calling the years after World War II “surprisingly imaginative,” he tips his hand about expectation: the default assumption is that governments under pressure become rigid, punitive, or small-minded. The surprise is the point. It flatters the period as an exception to the rule, a moment when institutions behaved better than their reputations.

The phrasing “courses we followed” reads like deliberate modesty, but it also spreads responsibility across a collective “we,” blurring authors and consequences. That’s a classic move when discussing grand strategy: make it feel like a national choice rather than a contest of interests, ideologies, and improvisations. “Extremely effective” then closes the loop with a results-oriented seal of approval, implying that morality and pragmatism aligned. The subtext: good values can be good policy, a rebuke to the cynical idea that ethics is a luxury item in geopolitics.

Context matters, because the postwar era is where myths get minted: reconstruction, alliance-building, welfare states, decolonization pressures, the early Cold War. Bruce’s intent is less to document than to defend a model of governance that invested in stability and long-term order. It’s nostalgia with an argument inside it: we once chose imagination over fear, and we could again.