Politics & Power Quote by J. William Fulbright

Fulbright’s line doesn’t argue policy so much as prosecute a national self-image. By pricing “empire” not in dollars or casualties but in “America’s soul,” he drags foreign policy out of the spreadsheet and into the confessional. “Empire” is the provocation: a word Americans instinctively reject as something other people do. Fulbright uses it anyway, forcing listeners to confront the possibility that power can be morally corrosive even when it arrives wearing democratic rhetoric.

The phrasing is strategically absolute. “The price” implies a transaction already underway, an accumulating debt. “America’s soul” is deliberately unquantifiable; you can’t offset it with GDP growth, strategic basing rights, or a clean-sounding doctrine. Then comes the moral veto: “too high.” Not “unwise,” not “counterproductive,” but illegitimate. He’s closing the door on the favorite escape hatch of superpowers: the idea that ends redeem means.

The context is crucial: Fulbright, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, became a leading critic of Cold War overreach, especially Vietnam. His hearings and speeches challenged the notion that America could police the world without being changed by it. The subtext is institutional as much as ethical: empire doesn’t just brutalize abroad; it concentrates authority at home, normalizes secrecy, and turns citizenship into spectatorship.

It works because it treats imperial ambition as a character test, not a chess move. Fulbright is warning that domination abroad invites self-deception at home - and that the worst casualty is the story a republic tells itself about why it’s allowed to wield force.