Politics & Power Quote by Brent Scowcroft

The sharpness here is in the downgrading: not a scandal, not a crisis, just a quiet audit of substance versus style. Scowcroft, a career national security hand, isn’t tossing out a hot take; he’s issuing a bureaucrat’s verdict with the chill of a briefing memo. “So far” is the tell. It plants a flag in time and implies a watchful waiting: the second term is still young, the file is still open, but the early returns don’t justify the hype.

“Changes in the president” personalizes what Washington usually treats as process. Second terms are supposed to produce metamorphosis - freed from reelection, a president can get bold, principled, reckless, or visionary. Scowcroft suggests the opposite: the president has adjusted the performance, not the policy. Calling the shift “mainly of a rhetorical nature” isn’t praise for eloquence; it’s a polite way to say the administration has rebranded without recalibrating. Different tone, same decisions.

The subtext is a warning aimed at two audiences. To insiders: don’t mistake a new script for a new strategy. To the public and press: resist the seduction of “pivot” narratives that are easy to write and harder to verify. Coming from Scowcroft - a figure associated with cautious, realist statecraft - the line also signals discomfort with politics-as-spectacle. He’s not claiming the president is unchanged; he’s saying the only evidence so far is cosmetic, and cosmetics don’t move troops, budgets, or alliances.