Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Bremer

Bremer’s sentence does something quietly strategic: it turns a messy political history into a manageable learning curve. By anchoring “the new wave of terrorism” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he frames terrorism as a recurring modern condition, not an aberration that began on 9/11. That timeline matters because it borrows the authority of precedent. If the problem has come in waves before, then today’s response can be rationalized as part of an ongoing, technocratic project rather than a panicked overreaction.

The most revealing phrase is “trying to figure out how to deal with it.” It’s a soft, managerial verb choice that distances the speaker from the moral and political violence of counterterrorism. “Deal with” flattens questions that defined that era: intelligence expansion, policing, emergency laws, proxy conflicts, and the persistent trade-off between security and civil liberties. The decade he mentions becomes a grace period for uncertainty, a way to normalize institutional stumbling without assigning blame for missteps or overreach.

There’s also a coalition-building subtext in “the United States and our allies.” It invites the listener to see counterterrorism as collective, coordinated, and therefore legitimate. Yet the passive construction hides agency: which allies, which tactics, which consequences? In context, coming from a statesman associated with U.S. security architecture, the line reads like a preemptive defense of long timelines and imperfect outcomes. It’s less a recollection than a framing device: terrorism as a durable policy problem, and state response as the slow work of systems learning to survive.