Politics & Power Quote by George Soros

Power, in Soros's telling, is never the scarce resource; self-control is. The opening is calibrated reassurance: a blunt inventory of American hard power meant to shut down the post-9/11 reflex that treats every threat as existential. By naming "external power" and "terrorist organization" in the same breath, he collapses the usual hierarchy of enemies and reframes them as strategically manageable. The real danger arrives in the pivot: "But we can defeat ourselves". That turn is the point of the quote, and it lands because it weaponizes a national self-image. The United States prides itself on being unbeatable; Soros suggests it can still lose, just not the way it imagines.

"Quagmire" does the heavy lifting. It's a Vietnam word, a reminder that superpowers don't get toppled by opponents so much as by missions that metastasize: unclear objectives, sunk costs, domestic polarization, moral corrosion. The subtext is less about battlefield loss than about institutional and psychological damage - the way prolonged, open-ended conflict reorders budgets, liberties, and attention until a country is busy fighting itself.

Context matters: Soros, as a financier and political donor, is often read through partisan suspicion. That makes his framing strategic. He speaks in the language of national strength to buy credibility, then argues for restraint as a form of patriotism, not timidity. The intent isn't to diminish American power; it's to warn that power, misapplied, becomes a trap the enemy doesn't have to build.