Politics & Power Quote by Theodore C. Sorensen

A liberal internationalist’s reassurance, delivered with a lawyer’s neat hedges. Sorensen is staking out a middle lane between pacifist idealism and Cold War hair-trigger swagger: yes, America can talk about restraint, diplomacy, even new rules of engagement, without tying its own hands. The phrase “need not renounce” is doing quiet political work. It concedes the existence of critics who fear weakness, then dismisses their charge without dignifying it as debate.

The subtext is credibility. In the early 1960s, after the bruising optics of missile gaps, Berlin flashpoints, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, words about peace had to be armored against accusations of naivete. Sorensen, as a Kennedy-era speechwriter and counsel, understood that moral aspiration needed a hard edge to survive Washington. So he pairs “conventional force” with a narrow trigger: “clear and present danger,” a term borrowed from U.S. legal doctrine, repurposed as strategic threshold. That legalism isn’t accidental. It signals that force will be disciplined, justified, and limited not by emotion or ideology but by an ostensibly objective standard.

Yet the standard is also elastic. “Genuine threat” sounds like a constraint until you remember who gets to define “genuine.” “National security and survival” escalates the stakes to an existential register, the kind that can crowd out messy questions about proportionality, proxy wars, or the slow creep of mission expansion.

The intent, then, is dual: to deter adversaries by promising readiness, and to domesticate a more restrained posture for a skeptical public by wrapping it in the language of necessity and law. It’s moderation as a rhetorical weapon.