Politics & Power Quote by Chuck Hagel

Hagel’s line reads like a loyalty oath with an asterisk: the United Nations is indispensable, but only if it changes. That two-step is the point. As a U.S. politician and former defense secretary, he’s speaking to two skeptical audiences at once - internationalists who need reassurance that America still buys into multilateral order, and domestic hawks who hear “UN” and think constraint, bureaucracy, and vetoes.

The rhetorical move is to stack the UN’s aspirations in a comforting crescendo - stability, security, democracy, human rights, economic development - then pivot to the corrective: “but it needs reform.” The list isn’t accidental; it wraps hard-power concerns (“stability,” “security”) in moral language (“human rights”) and market logic (“economic development”), presenting the UN as a Swiss Army knife for problems the U.S. cannot or will not solve alone. It’s also a subtle defense of legitimacy: if the UN is framed as the venue where values and interests align, engagement becomes pragmatic rather than sentimental.

The subtext is frustration without rupture. “As relevant today as at any time” implies a world of cross-border threats - post-9/11 security, nuclear proliferation, fragile states, rising China, climate-driven instability - where unilateral swagger looks dated. “Reform” functions as a pressure valve: it acknowledges peacekeeping failures, Security Council paralysis, and bloated agencies while keeping faith in the institution’s core bargain. Hagel isn’t idealizing the UN; he’s arguing that American power works best when it can borrow the UN’s stamp of collective permission.