War & Peace Quote by John Hewson

Ridiculous is doing a lot of political work here: it’s a moral verdict disguised as common sense. John Hewson’s line doesn’t argue policy detail by detail; it mocks the premise that military participation is the sensible default. By listing “troops, our ships, our planes,” he builds a drumbeat of escalation, a catalogue of national power that suddenly sounds absurd when stapled to “this war.” The rhetorical trick is subtraction: strip away lofty language about alliances and honor, and what remains is the raw mechanics of sending bodies and hardware into a conflict that, in his framing, doesn’t earn the sacrifice.

The intent is twofold. First, it’s a bid to puncture the inevitability that leaders often cultivate around war. “Ridiculous” implies the decision is not merely wrong but unserious, a failure of judgment that should embarrass its advocates. Second, it’s a claim of guardianship over the national interest. The repeated “our” turns the statement into a possessive act: these assets belong to the public, and using them casually is a breach of trust.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of performative toughness. Hewson positions military deployment as theater - a show of resolve that risks real lives for symbolic gain. Context matters: as a politician known for economic rationalism, he’s leaning on a voter-friendly intuition that war is a costly, often ill-defined project sold with grand abstractions. The line works because it refuses the grandeur and forces listeners to feel the mismatch between patriotic spectacle and the concrete reality of sending people into harm’s way.