Politics & Power Quote by Conan O'Brien

Conan O'Brien lands this joke with the kind of breezy cruelty only late-night can pull off: he frames Canada not as a principled dissenter, but as a well-meaning friend who simply forgot to bring any muscle. The setup pretends to be a sober recap of foreign policy ("continues to say"), then swerves into deflation. That pivot is the engine of the laugh: it replaces moral argument with logistical incompetence, turning a real geopolitical fracture into a bit about national self-image.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it flatters an American audience in the early-2000s moment when "with us or against us" logic dominated cable news, reducing complex alliances to a scoreboard. Second, it gives viewers permission to treat war as distant enough to joke about, while still acknowledging the headline. Late-night’s job in that era was to metabolize anxiety into punchlines; this one digests international dissent by making it harmless.

The subtext is sharper than the surface. Canada’s refusal to join the Iraq War is recast as inability, not choice, implying that power is the only language that counts. It's also a gentle jab at America’s expectation of automatic backup: the joke only works if you assume the U.S. is the default protagonist and everyone else is a supporting character with limited equipment.

Context matters: the Iraq War debate was raging, and public discourse was saturated with patriotic certainties. O'Brien sidesteps the moral minefield by aiming at stereotype - Canada as polite, unthreatening - letting the audience laugh without asking whether the war itself deserved skepticism.