War & Peace Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Anxiety about war doesn’t usually announce itself with poetry; it shows up as a demand for receipts. Goodwin’s question - “Where’s the progress that we’re going to see in Afghanistan?” - is less a policy prompt than a political survival test. Coming from a presidential historian, it carries the implicit memory of how conflicts collapse at home before they collapse abroad: Vietnam’s credibility gap, Iraq’s shifting rationales, the slow bleed of public patience when “mission” becomes mood.

The phrasing is telling. “Progress” isn’t defined in moral terms (security for Afghans, democratic legitimacy) but in terms of demonstrable change that can be narrated to voters. That’s the subtext: modern war requires a domestic storyline as much as a battlefield strategy. If leaders can’t translate sacrifice into visible movement, the war turns from national project into background scandal, a costly inertia that invites cynicism.

Her second line widens the frame: public support must be “kept” both on the economy and the war. It’s a blunt acknowledgment that legitimacy is a two-front campaign. In a democracy, war is never insulated from grocery prices, unemployment numbers, and the general feeling of national competence. Goodwin is pointing to a brittle equilibrium: when economic stress rises, tolerance for ambiguous military aims shrinks. “These things will really become troubling” is almost an understatement-by-design, the historian’s way of saying: this is how presidencies get eaten alive - not by a single defeat, but by compounded drift that voters can’t justify to themselves anymore.