Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence Eagleburger

Anxiety is doing a lot of work here, but it’s calibrated anxiety: the kind a career diplomat uses to make an abstract threat feel like a missed appointment with history. Eagleburger’s “Some day, somebody” is a neat little dodge and a jab at the same time. It implies that the adults in the room are silent, that responsibility has been outsourced to a vague future, and that the current leadership is choosing comfort over consequence. The line doesn’t accuse; it indicts through omission.

The phrasing is built around a timeline, not a mushroom cloud. “A decade from now” drags nuclear proliferation out of the fantasy realm of sudden catastrophe and into the more plausible, more politically inconvenient world of slow-moving strategic rot: deterrence failures, regional arms races, collapsed alliances, black-market leakage, crises that start as “tests” and end as wars no one planned. He’s arguing that the real danger is normalization - the way a new nuclear fact, once tolerated, becomes the baseline everyone else must respond to.

Pairing “the North Koreans and the Iranians” matters, too. It collapses two distinct cases into one rhetorical bundle, signaling a broader doctrine: if you allow one determined state to push through, you train others on what works. The subtext is less about technical capability than about will and credibility. Eagleburger is warning that non-action isn’t neutral; it’s a policy choice whose bill arrives later, with interest.