Leadership Quote by Andrew Card

Power, not procedure, is the point of Andrew Card's line. Delivered by a senior political operator in the early-2000s Bush orbit, it treats the U.N. as a talk shop with symbolic value but no veto over American action. The sentence is engineered to sound reasonable - "can meet and discuss" nods politely to diplomacy - while drawing a hard boundary around sovereignty: discussion is tolerated; constraint is not.

The rhetoric works because it downgrades multilateral legitimacy into optional etiquette. "Permission" is a loaded word: it frames the U.N. not as a forum of peers but as an imagined superior handing out hall passes. That subtle shift flips the moral geometry of international law. If you need "permission", you're subordinate; if you don't, you're acting as a principal. Card's phrasing performs American primacy as common sense.

Context matters: this was the era when the U.S. was seeking international cover for security policy, especially around Iraq, while simultaneously signaling it would not be bound by a Security Council that might say no. The quote is a pressure tactic as much as a declaration: it warns allies and rivals that coalition-building will proceed with or without formal authorization, and it reassures domestic audiences wary of "global governance" that elected officials, not diplomats in New York, will decide.

The subtext is blunt: legitimacy is nice, compliance is optional, and power will settle the argument if procedure can't.