Politics & Power Quote by Benjamin Harrison

A quiet line with a hard edge: it drains the holy water out of foreign policy. By invoking God, Harrison isn’t preaching piety so much as denying the most seductive justification for intervention - the idea that American power comes with a divine badge and a limitless jurisdiction. “Commission” is the key word. It’s bureaucratic, almost legalistic, suggesting that even moral passion needs a warrant. Without one, “police the world” sounds less like heroism than like mission creep with a gun and a sermon.

The subtext is a warning about how easily a young superpower can confuse capability with obligation. In the late 19th century, the United States was industrializing fast, flexing naval muscle, and inching toward the imperial temptations that would culminate in the Spanish-American War and overseas possessions. Harrison himself was no simple isolationist; his era saw assertiveness in the Pacific, Latin America, and trade. That tension is part of what makes the line work: it isn’t a rejection of influence, but a refusal of messianic entitlement.

Rhetorically, the sentence flips a familiar script. Instead of claiming providence for expansion, it uses religious language to impose a limit. The effect is to pull foreign policy back into the realm of democratic accountability: if there’s no divine mandate, then the mandate must come from citizens, interests, and law - and it can be contested. In an age when moral certainty is often used to launder geopolitical ambition, Harrison’s phrasing insists that righteousness is not a strategy.