Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Hays Sulzberger

The old diplomatic piety of "non-interference" collapses here under the weight of modern power. Sulzberger, a publisher whose job was to translate world events into daily urgency, treats sovereignty less like a principle than a comforting slogan that no longer matches the wiring of the 20th century. His key move is the double bind: even when "we do not mean to", we still interfere. Intent becomes irrelevant once scale, media, and economics turn every major actor into an ambient force in other countries' lives.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of statesmen who cling to a legal fiction because it sounds clean. "Still say" implies ritualistic repetition: leaders recite the doctrine to signal restraint and virtue, while the world they've built makes restraint impossible. Sulzberger isn't necessarily cheering intervention; he's warning that innocence is no longer available as an alibi. Trade, capital flows, migration, wartime alliances, propaganda, and the mere act of broadcasting information across borders all function as pressure. A headline can destabilize a regime; an embargo can starve a city; a loan can rewire a politics. Even neutrality becomes an action.

Context matters: Sulzberger lived through two world wars, the rise of American global dominance, and the early Cold War, when "internal affairs" became the rhetorical battleground for coups, aid packages, and covert operations. Coming from a newspaper man, the line also smuggles in a media critique: telling the world what is happening is itself a kind of interference. The quote works because it punctures the moral comfort of staying "hands off" and replaces it with a more unsettling truth: in an interconnected world, power leaks, whether or not it is declared.