Politics & Power Quote by Kelly Miller

The sentence has the cool, clinical snap of a postmortem, the kind a sociologist delivers when he wants emotion to stop obscuring causality. Miller frames World War I not as a morality play but as a structural collapse: once Germany "herself" is falling, her allies are less independent actors than load-bearing beams in a failing building. The phrase "it is not strange" is doing heavy rhetorical work. It denies the reader the comfort of surprise, insisting that defeat was not an accident or a betrayal but an expected consequence of how power blocs actually operate.

Subtext: stop romanticizing alliances. Miller compresses a sprawling geopolitical story into a lesson about dependency. "Leagued with her" suggests entanglement, not partnership among equals; it hints that smaller nations hitched their legitimacy, resources, and fate to a dominant engine. When that engine sputtered under blockade, attrition, and internal strain, the connected parts didn’t merely lose; they were pulled down.

Context matters because Miller, an African American public intellectual working in an era obsessed with "great man" narratives and racial hierarchy, often argued against simplistic explanations of social outcomes. This line reads like a corrective to triumphalist wartime storytelling: victory and loss are rarely just about virtue. They’re about systems, incentives, and the hard math of being tied to a collapsing center of gravity. The result is a chastening, almost bureaucratic fatalism that still feels modern in an age of alliance politics and cascading failures.