War & Peace Quote by Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff is doing something slyly disarming here: he flatters his audience with peace and then indicts them for it. “Very little real experience” isn’t nostalgia for hardship; it’s a warning about what comfort does to judgment. He frames distance from war as the product of “some very good things,” a phrase that preemptively blocks the obvious objection (you want a draft back?). The maneuver lets him pivot from gratitude to unease: if war is no longer a shared civic burden, then the political and moral vocabulary we use to talk about it gets thinner, more theatrical, easier to weaponize.

The context matters. Ending the draft and losing in Vietnam didn’t just change military policy; it rewired the social contract. With an all-volunteer force, war becomes something a professional minority does on behalf of a civilian majority that can remain, as Ignatieff puts it, “severed.” The subtext is about democratic accountability: it’s easier to authorize force when the costs are culturally outsourced and unevenly distributed. “Defeat in Vietnam” also signals a generational psychic break. It’s not only that the war ended badly; it’s that the nation learned to fear the intimacy of mass mobilization and the politics it unleashes.

As a politician, Ignatieff’s intent is double-edged. He’s clearing space for hawkish seriousness without chest-thumping, suggesting that our era’s problem isn’t lack of virtue but lack of contact. The line is an argument for humility: when experience is mediated, certainty gets cheap.