War & Peace Quote by Ramsey Clark

Calling U.S. foreign policy “the greatest crime since World War II” is meant to land like a moral indictment, not a policy critique. Ramsey Clark isn’t arguing about miscalculation or “unintended consequences”; he’s deliberately choosing the language of prosecution. “Crime” implies agency, pattern, and culpability. It collapses the usual euphemisms of statecraft - “intervention,” “stability,” “national interest” - into a single prosecutable act. The provocation is the point: to force Americans to see distant deaths as linked to decisions made in Washington, not as tragic weather systems that simply happen abroad.

The subtext is also institutional: Clark is speaking as someone who knew the machinery from the inside. As attorney general under LBJ, he witnessed the Vietnam era’s legitimacy crisis up close, then spent much of his later life as a dissenter, aligning himself with antiwar movements and controversial defendants. That biography gives the line its strange authority: the indictment is coming from a former custodian of the state’s legal order, someone who understands how power narrates itself into innocence.

Context matters because post-1945 U.S. foreign policy is inseparable from the Cold War’s moral alibi. Containment licensed coups, proxy wars, sanctions regimes, and “humanitarian” bombardments under the logic that the alternative was worse. Clark’s sentence refuses that bargain. By ranking policy above other postwar atrocities, he’s challenging the hierarchy of grief in American public life: whose lives count as grievable, whose violence is seen as structural, and how an empire keeps its conscience clean by outsourcing brutality to abstractions like “security.”