Politics & Power Quote by Louis Farrakhan

Farrakhan isn’t diagnosing foreign policy so much as staging an indictment: the Bush-era logic of preemption didn’t merely change what America did abroad; it changed what America meant to people who once reflexively defended it. The phrasing is tellingly cumulative - “doctrine,” then Afghanistan, then Iraq - stacking policy and wars into one moral and political continuum. Preemption becomes the hinge, the idea that makes the subsequent actions feel less like tragic necessity and more like chosen posture.

The line’s real target is legitimacy. By saying Bush “turned even his allies in Europe negatively,” Farrakhan invokes a kind of diplomatic canary in the coal mine: if the friends are recoiling, the problem can’t be dismissed as the usual hostility from adversaries or ideological opponents. “Even” does a lot of work here, implying a baseline expectation that Europe, tied by NATO, history, and shared self-mythology about liberal democracy, should be the most forgiving audience. When that audience sours, it signals a deeper reputational damage - what we’d now call America’s brand, its soft power, its moral authority to lead.

The context matters: post-9/11 fear, the swift international sympathy that followed, then the pivot to Iraq and the contested claims about weapons of mass destruction. Farrakhan, an activist long critical of U.S. power, leverages Europe as an external validator. It’s a strategic move: he’s not asking you to trust him. He’s asking you to notice who stopped trusting America.