Life & Wisdom Quote by Russell Banks

A single adverb does most of the damage here: "particularly". Banks isn’t claiming the U.S. betrayed Liberia only once; he’s pointing to a pattern, with one moment standing out as especially stark. The line is blunt enough to sound like reportage, but its bite comes from how it reorders a familiar American story. Instead of framing foreign policy as messy realism, Banks frames it as selective intimacy: Liberia matters when it’s useful, disposable when it’s not.

The context is loaded. Liberia was founded in the 19th century by formerly enslaved and free Black Americans through the American Colonization Society, built with U.S. backing and cultural imprint. For decades it functioned as a kind of quasi-client state: American-style institutions, American capital, American influence. During the Cold War, that relationship had strategic value; an aligned government on the West African coast was an asset in a global chess match.

Banks’s specific intent is to puncture the sentimental myth of benevolent ties. The subtext is transactional shame: once the Soviet threat evaporated, so did Washington’s urgency, even as Liberia slid into civil war and mass atrocities. The word "abandoned" implies not just policy neglect but a moral breach, the refusal to take responsibility for a relationship the U.S. helped create and cultivate.

It works because it’s accusatory without theatrics. Banks, a novelist, writes like someone describing a family member who stops returning calls after they’ve gotten what they wanted. The sentence forces readers to confront how quickly "special relationships" become historical footnotes when the strategic payoff disappears.