Success Quote by Richard Lugar

Lugar’s line is a rebuke to the American allergy to patience: the recurring fantasy that a single election, a decisive strike, a blockbuster summit, or a new doctrine can “win” geopolitics the way a team wins a game. By insisting there are “no shortcuts,” he drains foreign policy of its Hollywood pacing and puts it back where practitioners live: in briefings, negotiations, budgets, alliance maintenance, verification regimes, and the unglamorous grind of keeping channels open when cameras aren’t.

The phrasing matters. “Victory” is the seductive word here, because it flatters a domestic audience that wants foreign policy to deliver clean endings and moral clarity. Lugar treats that craving as a liability. He counters with “slow” and “painstaking,” adjectives that sound almost anti-political in a culture addicted to rapid wins and performative toughness. The subtext is practical and chastening: if you sell the public on quick triumphs, you create a pressure cooker that rewards escalation, punishes compromise, and discards institutions the moment they feel tedious.

Contextually, Lugar’s career was built in the post-Cold War reality where the biggest successes were bureaucratic and cumulative: arms reduction, nuclear security, sanctions architecture, and steady coalition work. Those achievements rarely produce fireworks, but they prevent catastrophes. His “day by day and year by year” is also an argument for continuity across administrations, a quiet defense of expertise and diplomacy against the campaign-trail impulse to improvise. It’s foreign policy as maintenance: undervalued until the lights go out.