Leadership Quote by Duncan Hunter

The line lands like a shrug turned into policy: if America is getting hurt, it’s because Americans keep leaving the door open. “We seem to be our own worst enemies” frames vulnerability as self-inflicted, a moral failing as much as a strategic one. It’s a classic political move: shift the story from messy global interdependence to a cleaner, blame-ready narrative about preventable mistakes.

Hunter’s second sentence tightens that impulse into a prescription. “Critical U.S. infrastructure” is deliberately elastic language, wide enough to cover ports, power grids, telecom networks, even data and logistics. That vagueness is the point. It allows the audience to project their most vivid anxieties onto the term: blackouts, cyberattacks, supply-chain choke points, foreign leverage. “Remain in U.S. hands” isn’t just about ownership; it’s about control, loyalty, and the fantasy that geography can substitute for security.

The subtext is a rebuke of privatization and global capital, but it’s not anti-market so much as nationalist triage: the market can run free until it touches assets that feel like sovereignty. The rhetoric also sidesteps a harder truth: plenty of infrastructure failures are homegrown, driven by deregulation, underinvestment, and political gridlock. By casting the threat as foreign “hands,” the quote converts complex governance problems into a border problem.

Contextually, it echoes late-20th/early-21st century fights over foreign investment (ports, telecom), post-9/11 security politics, and the slow pivot toward economic nationalism that would later become bipartisan. It works because it offers a simple villain and an even simpler fix: keep it ours.