War & Peace Quote by Richard Perle

Perle’s line tries to collapse two very different categories - terrorists and “former Cold War allies” - into a single emotional diagnosis: jealousy and resentment. That move is not an accident; it’s a strategy. By psychologizing geopolitical disagreement, he shifts the argument away from policy specifics (wars, bases, trade terms, civilian casualties) and toward character flaws. If allies object to American strategy, the subtext suggests, they’re not responding to consequences or principles. They’re reacting to humiliation, envy, wounded pride.

The timing matters. Perle became a prominent voice in the post-9/11 national-security debate, where the U.S. was seeking not just cooperation but moral clarity: who’s “with us.” In that atmosphere, describing allied skepticism as emotionally adjacent to terrorism functions as a disciplinary warning. It says: distance yourself from our agenda and you risk being read as part of the same psychic ecosystem that produces violence. That’s a powerful insinuation because it doesn’t have to argue; it merely associates.

Rhetorically, the sentence is built to sound clinical (“animate,” “affect”), as if it’s an objective reading of motives. But it’s also a bit of political aikido, turning the irritation America provokes into proof of America’s righteousness. Resentment becomes evidence that U.S. power is decisive enough to inspire it. The intent isn’t to understand allies; it’s to pre-empt them, recoding dissent as pathology and making alignment feel like the only respectable posture.