War & Peace Quote by Brent Scowcroft

The line lands like a controlled detonation: a reminder that alliances are not a moral sorting hat. Scowcroft, a quintessential national security insider, uses the simplest possible architecture - two short questions, two short answers - to puncture the reflexive logic that treats Middle East politics as a team sport. "Yes" concedes the obvious baseline of US-Israel ties; "But" opens the trapdoor under the audience's assumptions. The real work happens in the phrasing: he doesn't ask whether Palestinians are an "ally" or "partner", terms that would demand commitments. He asks whether they are an "enemy", the category that authorizes violence, neglect, and political indifference.

The intent is defensive realism, not sentimentality. Scowcroft is policing language because language becomes policy: once a people are coded as the enemy, humanitarian concern looks like weakness, diplomacy looks like betrayal, and occupation becomes background noise. By refusing that label, he preserves room for negotiation and for American interests that don't neatly map onto Israel's government of the day.

Context matters. Scowcroft served at the height of the post-Cold War moment when Washington still imagined itself as an arbiter, not just a patron. He was also a prominent skeptic of the 2003 Iraq War and wary of ideologically driven foreign policy. Read against that broader record, the quote is a warning about strategic capture: when alliance management turns into automatic antagonism toward the other side, the US stops thinking and starts reacting. It's a small sentence with a big rebuke: you can support Israel without outsourcing your moral imagination - or your strategy.