Success Quote by Stephen Hadley

Diplomacy is doing two things at once: looking reasonable and tightening the screws. Hadley’s sentence performs that double act with bureaucratic calm. The surface message is procedural - talks with Europeans, negotiations, escalation to the U.N. Security Council. The real work happens in the phrase “it’s clear,” which tries to launder a political choice into an inevitability. Clarity here isn’t a discovery; it’s a pre-authorization.

The line is also a subtle exercise in coalition management. “We’ve talked to the Europeans” signals legitimacy to multiple audiences: allies abroad, skeptics at home, and potential fence-sitters at the U.N. It implies the U.S. isn’t acting unilaterally; it’s moving with a bloc. That matters because Security Council action depends on persuading, pressuring, or cornering other major powers into going along - or at least not vetoing.

Notice the conditional: “if those negotiations fail.” Failure is framed as the other side’s fault, not the coalition’s. It sets a trap-door: once talks “fail,” escalation becomes the responsible next step, not a strategic escalation. And “take the matter” is a tidy euphemism for what usually follows - sanctions, formal condemnation, and the slow construction of a case that can justify harder measures later.

Contextually, this is post-9/11 foreign policy language at its most polished: multilateral packaging for a coercive trajectory. The intent is to make pressure feel like due process, and to make due process feel like consensus.