Wit & Attitude Quote by Caspar Weinberger

Trust is doing the heavy lifting here, and Weinberger knows it. The line reads like a procedural caution, but it’s really a worldview: diplomacy is not a moral aspiration, it’s a transaction, and the currency is credibility. If the other side can’t be counted on, then the tools everyone likes to praise as “responsible” - sanctions and negotiations - become not just weak, but “foolish,” a word chosen to shame the fashionable optimism of diplomatic ritual.

Weinberger’s intent is to set a hard prerequisite before the first handshake: enforceability. The repetition (“talking with and negotiating with and trying to reach agreements with”) mimics the exhausting choreography of foreign policy, then undercuts it with a blunt test: will they keep their word? Subtext: the real problem isn’t complexity; it’s character. That’s a very Reagan-era defense establishment move, recasting geopolitical conflict as a matter of reliability versus deceit, and it conveniently shifts attention away from whether sanctions are well-designed or negotiations are skillful. The failure, he implies, is baked in when the counterpart is untrustworthy.

Context matters: Weinberger was Secretary of Defense during a period shaped by Cold War suspicion, proxy wars, and a domestic appetite for “strength” after Vietnam. In that environment, insisting on trust functions less as a practical criterion than as a gatekeeping device: if trust can’t be demonstrated, escalation and military preparedness start to look like the only “serious” options. The quote’s quiet power is how it makes skepticism sound like prudence - and makes engagement sound naive.