Politics & Power Quote by Lloyd Cutler

Cutler’s sentence is lawyerly in the most devastating way: it drains the romance from geopolitics and replaces it with motive. “Internal political reasons” is the tell. He’s not arguing about principle, ideology, or even strategy in the grand sense; he’s pointing to the domestic incentive structure that turns foreign conflict into a convenient adhesive. The verbs do the real work. “Galvanize” and “unify” are action words borrowed from nation-building rhetoric, but here they’re exposed as tactics, not virtues. Unity isn’t a byproduct of shared values; it’s manufactured through the choice of an enemy.

The line “against the Americans” carries a cold recognition that national identity is often built negatively: not who we are, but who we’re not. Cutler’s subtext is that anti-Americanism, in that moment, functioned less as a policy position than as a political technology. He’s also implicitly critiquing the American tendency to treat hostile acts as sui generis eruptions of hatred. His framing suggests something more banal and therefore more unsettling: leaders sometimes need a crisis the way campaigns need a message.

The kicker is the counterfactual: “if they hadn’t had that immediate opportunity they would have found another one.” That’s not speculation so much as an indictment of inevitability. It implies a system primed for confrontation, where “opportunity” isn’t an accident but an opening waiting to be seized. In context, it reads like a warning to policymakers: don’t misread provocation as purely reactive, and don’t assume restraint from actors who benefit internally from escalation.