Success Quote by J. William Fulbright

Fulbright’s line flips the Cold War script with a senator’s scalpel: the real danger, he suggests, isn’t Soviet capability but American convenience. By downgrading the USSR from omnipotent villain to useful alibi, he indicts Washington’s habit of laundering domestic shortcomings through foreign threat. The menace is psychological and political: an external rival that can be endlessly invoked to excuse inequality, underfunded schools, racial violence, civic corrosion, and the lazy reflex to meet complexity with militarization.

The phrasing does the heavy lifting. “Not so much because of what it has done” punctures the inflationary rhetoric of national security, then “because of the excuses it has provided” turns blame into a transaction. The Soviets become a supplier; America becomes the customer. It’s a devastating piece of subtext: superpower competition isn’t only fought with missiles and proxies, but with narratives that let leaders evade accountability and publics accept diminished ambitions at home.

Context matters. Fulbright, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, became a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and the broader doctrine of containing communism at any cost. This quote reads like an argument against the permanent-emergency state: once you can attribute every failure to an enemy, reform becomes optional, dissent becomes suspect, and patriotism gets reduced to obedience. He’s warning that a nation can lose to its adversary without ever being conquered, simply by letting fear become an all-purpose excuse.