For if this country... were to make its defense program a function of its domestic employment situation, it would become impossible to conduct a constructive and well-thought out foreign policy or to develop any lasting collaboration. Note: compare Dwight Eisenhower's January, 1961 Farewell Speech -- The New Society (1950)
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Defense policy should not depend on domestic employment, or it will hinder foreign policy.
- In plain terms
- Don't base defense policy on jobs; it weakens foreign policy and long-term planning.
- What can you take from it?
- Keep defense policy separate from domestic employment needs.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How do we defend without creating jobs?
- Is foreign policy really independent?
Another view
Political pressure often links defense and jobs regardless.
More from Peter F. Drucker
Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society. The Practice of Management (1954)
Permalink to quote #52 That the government's power under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop a strike by injunction so clearly strengthens the hand of the employer--even though it is used o…
Permalink to quote #54 Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private v…
Permalink to quote #51
Related quotes
The United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.
John KerryJohn Kerry quote #27 We are not isolationists except in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. Yet we must remember that so long as war exists on earth there w…
Franklin Delano RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt quote #44 The West as a whole in the early 1990s became obsessed with a 'peace dividend' that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and someti…
Margaret ThatcherMargaret Thatcher quote #70