Politics & Power Quote by Evan Thomas

"Victory must be assured in advance" is the kind of blunt requirement that pretends to be strategic while quietly confessing to an anxiety: America wants war the way it wants products, with guarantees, return policies, and no unpleasant surprises. Evan Thomas, writing as a journalist steeped in the mechanics of power, frames victory less as an outcome than as a precondition. That inversion matters. It exposes how modern conflict gets sold at home: not as a grim wager with real risk, but as a managed demonstration of competence.

The second sentence sharpens the diagnosis into something almost transactional. "The American public must be all for it from the outset" treats consent as a logistical necessity, like fuel or air cover. The subtext isn’t simply that democracies need public buy-in; it’s that buy-in must be front-loaded, before the costs arrive and the moral ambiguities bloom. You can hear the ghost of recent history in the phrasing: Vietnam’s televised slog, Iraq’s collapsing rationale, Afghanistan’s endlessness. The lesson absorbed by political and military planners isn’t just "don’t lose" but "don’t let the story get away from you."

Thomas’s economy of language does its own critique. The passive authority of "must" suggests an institutional mindset that fears uncertainty and hates open-ended commitments, even as it remains tempted by intervention. It’s a portrait of a superpower constrained not only by rivals abroad, but by attention spans, polling curves, and the brittle politics of patience at home.