"Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed"
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Foreign policy, Shipler argues, is a staged illusion: the audience is trained to clap at the flourishes while the real trick happens off to the side. It is a metaphor that flatters and indicts the reader at once. We are not just misinformed; we are misdirected. The “dramatic flourishes” are the set pieces of international life - summit handshakes, speeches, airstrikes filmed in night-vision green, a leader’s tough talk timed for the evening news. They are vivid, legible, and emotionally satisfying, which is precisely why they’re useful.
The “other hand” is where policy actually gets made: quiet bargaining, intelligence work, arms sales, back-channel deals, budget choices, sanctions carve-outs, and the bureaucratic grind that turns rhetoric into consequences. Shipler’s journalistic instinct shows in the image: it’s not a conspiracy-board paranoia so much as a lesson in attention economics. What gets seen is what can be narrated quickly; what matters is often technical, incremental, and deliberately opaque.
Contextually, Shipler writes from the late Cold War into the post-9/11 media environment, when spectacle and strategy increasingly converge. Governments learned to perform for cameras; news organizations learned that performance travels. The subtext is a warning about democratic oversight: if citizens and reporters fixate on the show, leaders can claim mandate without scrutiny. The magician doesn’t need you to be stupid. He just needs you to be watching exactly where he points.
The “other hand” is where policy actually gets made: quiet bargaining, intelligence work, arms sales, back-channel deals, budget choices, sanctions carve-outs, and the bureaucratic grind that turns rhetoric into consequences. Shipler’s journalistic instinct shows in the image: it’s not a conspiracy-board paranoia so much as a lesson in attention economics. What gets seen is what can be narrated quickly; what matters is often technical, incremental, and deliberately opaque.
Contextually, Shipler writes from the late Cold War into the post-9/11 media environment, when spectacle and strategy increasingly converge. Governments learned to perform for cameras; news organizations learned that performance travels. The subtext is a warning about democratic oversight: if citizens and reporters fixate on the show, leaders can claim mandate without scrutiny. The magician doesn’t need you to be stupid. He just needs you to be watching exactly where he points.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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