Politics & Power Quote by Norman Cousins

Cousins isn’t offering a pacifist bumper sticker so much as a hard-nosed diagnosis of how nations talk themselves into perpetual danger. “Security,” in his framing, doesn’t come from louder threats or faster trigger fingers; it comes from governing the conditions that make violence possible. The pivot from “use of force” to “control of force” is the whole trick: he keeps the language of power, but changes its verb. Power isn’t renounced. It’s domesticated.

The intent is to separate deterrence from domination. “Use” implies activation, a willingness to solve political problems by turning coercion into action. “Control” implies discipline: limits, oversight, treaties, institutions, and norms that keep force from becoming a default reflex. Cousins writes like someone who knows American mythology runs on muscular certainty, so he doesn’t ask the country to stop being strong. He asks it to redefine strength as restraint with infrastructure.

The subtext is a critique of the security narrative that equates safety with escalation. By extending the claim to “any people,” he also punctures American exceptionalism: the cycle of fear, arms, and retaliation isn’t a uniquely American tragedy, just one America is uniquely equipped to amplify.

Context matters. Cousins made his name in the shadow of world war and the glare of the Cold War, when “security” often meant nuclear readiness and credibility theater. In that era, “control of force” reads as an argument for arms control, crisis management, and diplomacy as practical survival tools, not moral ornamentation. It’s idealism with a ledger: if force is inevitable, then the only sane policy is to keep it on a leash.