Leadership Quote by George Ball

Ball’s line is the rhetorical equivalent of closing the courtroom before the trial begins. By declaring the question “no longer whether” the U.S. should help ensure Israel’s “survival and prosperity,” he doesn’t argue a policy so much as he pre-emptively removes it from democratic contest. The key move is “that goes without saying”: a phrase that pretends to be modest while doing something muscular. It signals that dissent isn’t merely wrong, it’s outside the boundaries of respectable debate.

The intent is to shift attention from first principles to implementation. If the premise is treated as axiomatic, policymakers and the public are steered toward managerial questions: how much aid, what kind of security guarantees, which diplomatic posture. That’s convenient for coalition-building in Washington, where framing a position as consensus reduces political risk and isolates critics. “Assuring” also matters: it implies an active U.S. role in shaping outcomes, not just offering support. And pairing “survival” with “prosperity” widens the mandate from existential defense to long-term flourishing, a subtle expansion that can justify a broad range of commitments.

Contextually, Ball was known as a skeptical voice inside U.S. foreign policy circles during the Vietnam era and was often wary of open-ended entanglements. That makes the formulation even more revealing: it reads less like idealism than like a concession to the center of gravity in American politics at the time. The subtext is about domestic legitimacy as much as foreign strategy: solidarity presented as common sense, so the real argument can proceed without reopening the moral ledger.