Politics & Power Quote by Moshe Sharett

A statesman rarely earns points for admitting the future might go badly. That is exactly why Moshe Sharett's line lands with such hard, deliberate force. "We don't know" is not rhetorical modesty; it's an argument against the intoxication of certainty that so often follows battlefield success or national mythmaking. Sharett is speaking as someone tasked with keeping a young, embattled state alive, and he chooses a vocabulary of vulnerability: "may yet happen", "may yet have to face". The repetition is a brake pedal, slowing an audience that wants acceleration.

The key move is pairing "military and political defeats" as if they are twin threats. Sharett refuses the comforting hierarchy in which a state can always "win" politically if it wins militarily, or vice versa. He is warning that power is not a shield against consequence: armies can falter, alliances can sour, legitimacy can erode, and today's tactical triumph can become tomorrow's diplomatic isolation. The line also implies a critique of maximalism. If you admit defeat is possible, you implicitly argue for restraint, contingency planning, and negotiations that look, to hard-liners, like softness.

Context matters: Sharett, Israel's second prime minister and a foreign-policy minded pragmatist, often stood in tension with more militarized approaches. This sentence reads like an attempt to inoculate public discourse against hubris. It's not fearmongering; it's a governing ethic. He is asking his society to grow up fast, to trade prophetic certainty for strategic adulthood.