Politics & Power Quote by J. William Fulbright

Fulbright’s sentence is a velvet-gloved warning: America’s power is a fact, but its moral authority is a choice. The line hinges on that conditional clause, “if it can bring itself,” which quietly implies the harder truth that the country often cannot. He frames restraint not as sacrifice but as self-mastery, treating empathy as statecraft rather than sentiment. “Appropriate to its size and power” lands like a rebuke to the superpower reflex that confuses dominance with leadership. Fulbright is arguing that scale increases obligation; the bigger the footprint, the less excusable the stomp.

The phrase “intelligent example” is doing double duty. “Example” invokes the old American self-image as a model republic, but “intelligent” adds an acid qualifier: admiration isn’t automatic, it must be earned through wise conduct. He’s also pushing back against the then-fashionable assumption that anti-communism justified almost any intervention. Fulbright, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading critic of the Vietnam War, had watched bipartisan consensus calcify into a kind of moral autopilot. This is the anti-autopilot argument: greatness should look like magnanimity, not mere capability.

Subtextually, he’s speaking to an empire that refuses the label. Magnanimity is what victors claim to possess; empathy is what empires tend to lack. Fulbright’s genius is to make both sound like patriotism. He invites Americans to see humility not as weakness, but as the only credible way a powerful nation can be “an example” instead of a cautionary tale.