War & Peace Quote by Ricardo Lagos

Lagos is doing diplomatic jujitsu: endorsing military force while trying to firewall it from the cultural and moral blowback that usually follows. The sentence is built on a careful series of negations - not the country, not the culture, not a religion - because he knows what airstrikes can look like from the ground and on TV: collective punishment dressed up as precision. By naming what the strikes are not, he implicitly admits the accusation already exists, or is about to.

The line also performs coalition maintenance. In the post-9/11 era, support for U.S.-led action became a litmus test of alignment, but it was politically combustible in Latin America, where memories of U.S. intervention and suspicion of open-ended war run deep. Lagos, a center-left Chilean president with human-rights credibility, positions himself as both responsible ally and moral custodian: yes to targeting terrorists, no to civilizational framing.

The subtext is a warning wrapped in consent. He grants legitimacy to the operation only if it remains narrow, disciplined, and conceptually clean. The phrase "an enemy of them all" universalizes the threat to discourage the "West vs. Islam" narrative and to invite Muslim-majority societies into the moral coalition. It's a line designed for multiple audiences at once - Washington, skeptical domestic voters, and a global public wary of turning counterterrorism into a crusade - and its power lies in that tightrope act: approve the bombs, reject the mythology.