War & Peace Quote by Fred Thompson

A politician’s favorite alibi is grammar, and Fred Thompson reaches for it here like a life raft: “some say,” “ambiguous,” “as to what we would do.” The sentence is a thicket of qualifiers that lets him gesture at historical failure without owning a clear verdict. That’s the intent: sound tough-minded about American resolve while keeping every exit open.

The context matters. Thompson is talking about U.S. foreign policy credibility, invoking Korea and the Persian Gulf as cautionary tales about muddled signaling. “Ambiguous” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s a critique that flatters a certain worldview: wars happen when America hesitates, deterrence works when America is unmistakable. In the late-20th-century political mainstream, this argument was catnip - it recasts complex conflicts into a solvable communications problem, as if history is a press release that needed stronger verbs.

The subtext is aimed less at past presidents than at present audiences: don’t reward nuance; reward certainty. By citing “mistakes” without naming specific actors, policies, or consequences, Thompson turns tragedy into a bipartisan fog, then positions himself on the clearer, firmer side of it. Even the muddled phrasing (“proceeding that... proceeding”) inadvertently reinforces the point: confusion is the villain, decisiveness the hero.

It works rhetorically because it converts anxiety into a simple demand: stop being “ambiguous.” The cost is that it treats diplomacy, alliance management, and domestic constraint as weakness rather than reality - a familiar, electorally useful simplification.