"We will continue to work together in our common fight against terror"
About this Quote
“Common fight” is doing the real labor here: it’s a diplomatic pressure point disguised as solidarity. Condoleezza Rice’s phrasing compresses a whole post-9/11 worldview into one tidy promise of togetherness, but the sentence is less reassurance than alignment mechanism. The “we” is elastic on purpose. It can mean the U.S. and a specific ally standing at a podium, or it can silently expand to include (and conscript) a wider coalition. Either way, it implies that serious states belong on one side of a moral ledger.
The verb choice matters. “Continue” frames the campaign as already underway, already justified, already irreversible; it shuts the door on debate about whether the strategy is working or whether the costs have been acceptable. “Work together” sounds benign and managerial, the language of committees and partnerships, smoothing over the fact that counterterror policy often involves coercion: intelligence sharing, basing rights, financial surveillance, rendition, and the quiet bargaining that happens off-camera. The line reassures domestic audiences that the U.S. is not isolated while simultaneously signaling to foreign governments that cooperation is the default expectation.
“Against terror” is the most rhetorically powerful and most slippery segment. Terror is an emotion and a tactic, not a state actor you can sign an armistice with. That vagueness is strategic: it keeps the mission broad, the timeline indefinite, and the target list adaptable. In Rice’s era at State and the National Security Council, that flexibility was the point. The sentence sells permanence as partnership.
The verb choice matters. “Continue” frames the campaign as already underway, already justified, already irreversible; it shuts the door on debate about whether the strategy is working or whether the costs have been acceptable. “Work together” sounds benign and managerial, the language of committees and partnerships, smoothing over the fact that counterterror policy often involves coercion: intelligence sharing, basing rights, financial surveillance, rendition, and the quiet bargaining that happens off-camera. The line reassures domestic audiences that the U.S. is not isolated while simultaneously signaling to foreign governments that cooperation is the default expectation.
“Against terror” is the most rhetorically powerful and most slippery segment. Terror is an emotion and a tactic, not a state actor you can sign an armistice with. That vagueness is strategic: it keeps the mission broad, the timeline indefinite, and the target list adaptable. In Rice’s era at State and the National Security Council, that flexibility was the point. The sentence sells permanence as partnership.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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