Politics & Power Quote by Allyson Schwartz

A politician’s sentence that tries to sound like policy and ends up revealing a posture: toughness first, specifics later. Schwartz pairs two lanes of American power: multilateral legitimacy ("push the United Nations Security Council") and unilateral resolve ("it is our job to take meaningful steps"). The structure does quiet rhetorical work. By placing the UN first, she borrows the sheen of international consensus; by pivoting to "in the meantime", she pre-authorizes action without waiting for that consensus to materialize. It’s a familiar Washington move: diplomacy as stage-setting, force as the punchline.

The intent is less about describing Iran than about positioning the United States as the responsible adult in a dangerously cluttered room. "Thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions" frames Tehran not as a state with security calculations but as a plot with motive, implying inevitability unless stopped. "Eliminate the threats posed by Iran" shifts the target from a program to an identity: Iran becomes the threat itself, not a set of negotiable behaviors. That matters, because programs can be inspected and constrained; threats, as a category, invite preemption.

Contextually, this language belongs to the post-9/11 era when "meaningful steps" served as a versatile euphemism, wide enough to cover sanctions, covert action, cyber operations, or military strikes without naming any of them. The subtext speaks to domestic audiences as much as foreign ones: if the UN stalls, don’t blame us; we already warned you we’d act.