War & Peace Quote by E. Howard Hunt

That bland little "quite right" is doing the dirtiest work in the sentence: it’s an audible pat on the head, a way of turning a loaded historical claim into a shared, reasonable conclusion. E. Howard Hunt isn’t arguing so much as laundering. By framing the Cold War as something that "grew and expanded out of Europe", he shifts agency away from Washington and toward an almost natural disaster drifting west. The United States, in this telling, doesn’t project power; it "had to take refuge."

Then comes the pivot word: "shield". The Monroe Doctrine, originally a 19th-century warning to European empires to keep out of the Western Hemisphere, is recast as defensive cover rather than a blueprint for U.S. dominance. Hunt’s phrasing smuggles in a justification for intervention-by-default: if the hemisphere is a fortress, then everything south of Texas becomes part of the perimeter. "Refuge" suggests vulnerability, but the Monroe Doctrine historically enabled the opposite - coups, pressure campaigns, and "stability" operations that read, to neighbors, like occupation by another name.

The context matters because Hunt is not a neutral policy hand. He’s a CIA operative turned Watergate felon, a figure whose career tracks the Cold War’s shadow repertoire: covert action, plausible deniability, and moral fog machines. The sentence is a miniature version of that craft. It offers an alibi shaped like strategy: America backed into a corner, clinging to an old principle for protection. The subtext is that extraordinary measures were regrettable necessities, not choices. That’s the rhetoric of empire when it wants to sound like self-defense.