Politics & Power Quote by Lawrence Eagleburger

Eagleburger’s sentence reads like diplomacy weaponized against itself: a public display of bafflement that’s actually an indictment. He’s not merely doubting the “evidence”; he’s questioning the machinery that’s supposed to translate intelligence into legitimacy. The repeated “I can’t” is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s modesty and uncertainty, the careful posture of a veteran diplomat. Underneath, it’s a sharp insinuation that something is off - either the evidence isn’t as solid as advertised, or the case has been sold so clumsily (or so selectively) that even friends can smell the seams.

The key move is the pivot “even to the president.” That phrase punctures the aura of executive certainty without outright accusing the White House of bad faith. It suggests an administration projecting confidence while privately wrestling with ambiguity. Eagleburger frames the allies’ refusal not as stubbornness but as an implicit referendum on the credibility of the presentation. If the evidence were truly “that clear,” persuasion wouldn’t be this hard; coalitions form around clarity and trust, not just power.

Context matters: a post-Cold War Washington trying to rally partners for military action, with the memory of Vietnam-era skepticism and the emerging expectation that U.S. claims must be internationally legible, not merely domestically assertive. Eagleburger is pointing to a modern constraint on American force: you don’t just need reasons - you need reasons that survive allied scrutiny. His “effort” sounds purposeful, but the sentence quietly asks whether it’s an effort to solve a problem, or to sell a decision already made.