Daily Inspiration Quote by Brent Scowcroft

“Progress” here isn’t the starry-eyed promise word it gets in campaign speeches; in Brent Scowcroft’s mouth it’s a sober, bureaucratic term for outcomes you can actually bank: deterrence that holds, wars you avoid, markets that don’t crash, alliances that don’t fray. The sentence reads simple, but its architecture is strategic. “Only possible” is a hard gate, not a preference. It’s the realist’s way of saying unilateral swagger is expensive, fragile, and usually self-defeating.

The key move is the pairing of “the United States” with “its allies.” Scowcroft isn’t flattering partners; he’s disciplining American ego. The subtext: power is not the same as control. Even at peak U.S. dominance, legitimacy, basing rights, intelligence sharing, sanctions enforcement, postwar reconstruction, and the slow grind of institution-building are collective goods. Allies aren’t decoration; they’re infrastructure. “Work together” is deliberately bland, signaling process over drama: coordination, coalition management, and compromise - the unsexy mechanics that keep a superpower from becoming a solitary actor with a long list of enemies and no leverage.

Context matters. Scowcroft’s career spans the Cold War’s alliance architecture, the Gulf War’s coalition model, and the post-9/11 temptation toward preemptive unilateralism. Read against that arc, the line functions as a quiet rebuke to the “go it alone” mood that periodically surges in Washington. It’s also a warning to allies: progress requires reciprocity, not freeloading or theatrical dissent. The intent is stabilizing - a belief that the international order is a machine that runs on maintenance, not miracles.