Politics & Power Quote by E. B. White

E. B. White lands this like a quiet punch: the problem isn’t that disarmament is hard, it’s that it’s being staged as theater inside a building engineered for contradiction. The image is almost slapstick in its precision: one room full of lofty talk, the next room rearranging the chessboard that makes weapons feel nonnegotiable. By choosing “knights and pawns,” White frames diplomacy as a game played by powerful pieces while ordinary people absorb the consequences. Pawns don’t choose the match; they get sacrificed so the players can keep calling themselves strategic.

The line’s intent is less anti-UN than anti-fantasy. “World organization” sounds grand and antiseptic, a bureaucratic halo. White punctures it by showing how institutions can host moral aspiration and realpolitik simultaneously, without resolving either. The phrase “make national arms imperative” is the key bit of acid: the imperative isn’t natural; it’s manufactured by the very moves states make to protect their interests, lock in alliances, posture, intimidate, and pre-empt. Disarmament talks become a pressure valve that releases public anxiety while leaving the underlying incentives intact.

Context matters: White wrote in the long shadow of World War II and into the Cold War, when the United Nations symbolized a new hope and an old pattern. His subtext is that modern diplomacy can become compartmentalized hypocrisy: ideals are housed safely in one room, power plays in another, and the hallway between them is where cynicism is born.