"When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests"
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Fulbright is doing something politicians rarely risk: arguing that power is weakest when it cheats. The sentence is built like a trap for the cynic. He concedes the temptation up front - “whatever short-term advantage may be gained” - then tightens the moral ledger into a strategic one. It is not piety; it is self-preservation. Break the rules, and you don’t just commit an isolated act. You broadcast a lesson about what counts as permissible.
The subtext is aimed at a superpower and its elites: when the state treats law as optional, it trains everyone else to do the same. That’s a domestic warning (eroded legitimacy, selective enforcement, public contempt) and an international one (norms replaced by retaliation and improvisation). Fulbright’s key move is to shift “law” from a constraint to an asset. Stability isn’t portrayed as a lofty ideal; it’s infrastructure for national interest. Once you puncture it, the costs can’t be neatly calculated or contained - hence “incalculable damage,” a phrase that sounds like a budget hawk confronting the price of moral hypocrisy.
Context matters. Fulbright’s career arc is inseparable from mid-century American power: Cold War brinkmanship, Vietnam, covert action, the creeping belief that necessity authorizes shortcuts. His intent is to puncture that doctrine. The line reads like an indictment of the “rules for thee, not for me” foreign policy style - and a reminder that credibility, at home and abroad, is the only force multiplier you can’t buy back quickly once it’s squandered.
The subtext is aimed at a superpower and its elites: when the state treats law as optional, it trains everyone else to do the same. That’s a domestic warning (eroded legitimacy, selective enforcement, public contempt) and an international one (norms replaced by retaliation and improvisation). Fulbright’s key move is to shift “law” from a constraint to an asset. Stability isn’t portrayed as a lofty ideal; it’s infrastructure for national interest. Once you puncture it, the costs can’t be neatly calculated or contained - hence “incalculable damage,” a phrase that sounds like a budget hawk confronting the price of moral hypocrisy.
Context matters. Fulbright’s career arc is inseparable from mid-century American power: Cold War brinkmanship, Vietnam, covert action, the creeping belief that necessity authorizes shortcuts. His intent is to puncture that doctrine. The line reads like an indictment of the “rules for thee, not for me” foreign policy style - and a reminder that credibility, at home and abroad, is the only force multiplier you can’t buy back quickly once it’s squandered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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