Leadership Quote by Ricardo Lagos

Lagos is trying to thread a political needle that most post-9/11 leaders either refused to see or didn’t have the room to acknowledge: security can’t be the only language a state speaks. The opening pair - “more careful, but more compassionate” - is calibrated for a public primed for retaliation. “Careful” reassures hawks that naivete isn’t on offer; “compassionate” signals that indiscriminate punishment is strategically stupid and morally corrosive. The syntax matters: he doesn’t say “either/or.” He insists on a double duty.

The most revealing move is the pivot from “strike” to “broaden our understanding.” “Strike” concedes the reality of force, but he tightens its target: “not deal with terrorists.” That phrase rejects the legitimizing choreography of negotiation, the implication that terror is just another bargaining position. Yet he immediately refuses the satisfying simplicity of a clean enemy. The real work, he suggests, happens off the battlefield: “understanding of the world outside our borders.” That’s a rebuke to provincial nationalism and to the idea that violence appears out of nowhere, detached from history, poverty, humiliation, or foreign policy.

Contextually, Lagos speaks as a Chilean center-left president with the memory of dictatorship and U.S. intervention in the background. He’s addressing a Western moment eager for moral clarity, offering instead a harder proposition: you can condemn terror without turning geopolitics into a revenge story. The subtext is diplomatic, too: small and mid-sized democracies want a counterterrorism agenda that doesn’t become a blank check for great-power unilateralism.