Politics & Power Quote by Tony Blair

Solidarity is doing double duty here: it consoles, and it conscripts. Blair’s “stand shoulder to shoulder” is intimate language for geopolitics, shrinking the Atlantic into a single human posture. In the immediate context - Britain responding to an American catastrophe and the coming “war on terror” - that closeness is the point. The line doesn’t merely sympathize with U.S. grief; it pre-commits Britain to U.S. action, translating mourning into a military and diplomatic alliance.

Notice the moral architecture. “This hour of tragedy” frames events as an emergency, a suspended time in which ordinary caveats (legal debate, proportionality, skepticism) can be treated as indulgences. Then comes the hard pivot: “we... will not rest.” That phrase borrows from wartime resolve, implying that hesitation is a kind of betrayal - of the dead, of friendship, of civilization itself.

“Evil” is the master key. It’s deliberately unspecific, and that’s why it works: a word that invites unity by discouraging questions. If the enemy is “evil,” the agenda becomes purification, not policy; “driven from our world” suggests not containment but eradication. The subtext is escalation without naming targets, timelines, or limits. Blair is building public permission for an open-ended campaign while presenting it as moral hygiene.

As a statesman, he’s also managing Britain’s identity: not merely a sympathetic observer, but a principal actor inside an American-led narrative. The rhetoric is compassionate on the surface, strategically binding underneath - grief alchemized into mandate.