War & Peace Quote by Ron Lewis

The line works because it turns fear into geography: terror is something you can keep “overseas” if you’re tough enough, early enough. Ron Lewis isn’t just advocating a policy preference; he’s offering a clean bargain to an anxious public: pay the costs of war abroad and you purchase safety at home. The rhetoric is retail-simple. “Must” shuts down debate, “fight and win” frames conflict as winnable in the way elections are winnable, and “so we never have to” dangles the fantasy of permanent prevention.

Its subtext is a familiar post-9/11 logic: preemption as self-defense, intervention as insurance. It also smuggles in a moral hierarchy. Violence “there” is positioned as regrettable but manageable; violence “here” is the real catastrophe. That’s not unusual in politics, but it’s revealing: the promise of security is anchored in distance, not in addressing root causes, diplomacy, intelligence, or domestic resilience. The sentence flattens terror into an external enemy you can defeat, rather than a tactic that mutates, migrates, and feeds on grievance and chaos.

Contextually, this is the language of the War on Terror era, when “support the troops” messaging fused with a strategic narrative that cast overseas campaigns as a protective moat. It’s persuasive because it feels like common sense. It’s dangerous because it treats complex, long-horizon risk as if it can be solved with a decisive battle - and because it makes dissent sound like inviting terror “here at home.”