“Given the risks of military action, the United States must make a final, good-faith attempt to negotiate a halt to Tehran’s nuclear program early in the Trump administration,” went the teaser text for an article by Richard Nephew in a social media post from Foreign Affairs on the first full day of the current presidential term in January. As it happens, the U.S. did exactly that before engaging in military action that has, as of this writing, proven almost laughably risk-free. But what is notable about it now is one particular word: that smug “must,” a word that inserts a tone of authority into all sorts of journalistic writing that possesses neither the power nor, apparently, the knowledge to be issuing imperatives almost as though written in the tone of God.
Confession: I have a certain temperamental allergy to taking orders. One of my least favorite things about being a child was being routinely instructed that I must do or not do certain things. And conversely, one of my great pleasures as an adult is being able to ignore such commands whenever possible. Yes, there are certain non-negotiables, such as paying taxes and wearing pants in public. But outside of those, I delight in the opportunity to decline orders and requests whenever possible.
Consequently, I am pained as a reader of political commentary to encounter the recurring use of imperatives, which have become so common as to represent a verbal tic among the pundit classes. You know the sort of thing I’m talking about. To take just a recent smattering: America, per a post from the Energy Department, “must lead with innovation.” Or is it that America, according to an article in Project Syndicate, “must lead from the center.” Really, as our friends at Foreign Affairs again sum it up, it’s that “America must do more.” There are, of course, many such cases.
As the above indicates, the U.S. tends to be the subject of this mode of discourse, but its applicability is universal — “China must lead the global warming fight,” from Politico, “Russia must lose,” from the Atlantic, and “America’s allies must save themselves,” from Foreign Affairs, yet again. One can almost visualize the writer punctuating these dictums by slamming a fist into their open hand, like a novice high school debater.
One might suppose that this repeated phrasing would indicate some grave urgency, but that would be a mistake. To put it in philosophy of language terms, the illocutionary force of such statements is not to ensure the undertaking of necessary action but to demonstrate the speaker’s own importance. With such devices, every tired hack can sound like the Sanhedrin when it comes to the gravest political events of the day.
The imperative to speak in imperatives is, in fact, so strong that the same publication can easily employ it for mutually exclusive claims, as when the Economist insisted that “Israel must fight on,” only to amend this to “the war in Gaza must end.” The important thing, really, is that the rhetorical device remains consistent.
The inevitable Thomas Friedman is likely the heavyweight champion here. The sheer number of times that America must do or have done a thing in his view is staggering: America must start the Earth race, America must lead a green new deal, America must reclaim “world leader” status, America must act, must act, must act, and so on ad infinitum. He has rival correspondents for this position, of course, such as the Financial Times’s gormless Edward Luce — “America must relearn diplomacy” — and the ubiquitous Fareed Zakaria, but it’s hard to match his combination of obliviousness and certitude.
With Barack Obama, both during and since his presidency, this mode of speech leapt from the page, or pixel, to high office. Thus, we faced the somewhat surreal image of a world leader exhorting the country to undertake decisions over which he himself notionally held authority. Canada’s erstwhile prime minister, Justin Trudeau, borrowed this passive vernacular — housing in Canada “must retain its value” — though, in his case, he seemed genuinely unaware that the things he was describing were actually part of his job remit.
This terminology has now metastasized to the point that heads of state, who should really know better, are employing it in reference to other countries as though rhetorical exhortations constituted a policy in and of themselves. The formulation reached its nadir, thus far, when the same Trudeau mistakenly declared that “Russia must win this war.” Even without the gaffes, it is disconcerting to see leaders of major countries behave as though words rather than material incentives are what matter most in international politics.
Part of what is fascinating about this particular tone and phrasing is how divorced it is from real authority. If I routinely spoke in terms of orders that were almost never obeyed and even then only incidentally, I would probably reach a breaking point of humiliation. But for such scribes, impotence is no bar to rhetorical self-importance.
The problem isn’t so much the certainty with which these proclamations are issued but the question-begging they entail. Says who? Or else what? Rarely does one see these musts expressed in if-then or because-then terms. After all, the best course of action is usually conditioned on one’s preferred goals and against one’s material capabilities. But the default perspective for political analysts, consultants, and so on is basically Olympian. So such people have little difficulty speaking in this bossy mode, even when their injunctions pertain to distant countries in which they hold no residency and of which they have limited experience.
Speaking as a parent, I personally have no trouble expressing myself in imperatives. But I typically keep my audience limited, two people, plus I have some ability to ensure my demands are carried out. By contrast, the bureaucrats and members of the commentariat routinely scale up to improbable dimensions. After all, even the world’s smaller countries can comprise millions of people. And, indeed, we now see this rhetoric applied even more broadly, as when the heads of international organizations take it upon themselves to instruct not just single states but the entire developed world. Witness, for example, the must-y speech patterns on display at the United Nations, such as a recent speech by Secretary General Antonio Guterres featuring no fewer than 11 musts, including the claim that “business models and practices must be reworked to advance the Sustainable Development Goals.” Must they now? That’s nice. Doubtless, we can look forward to being informed what the entire species must do in the event of any future extraterrestrial invasions.
THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME IS NOT VERY ROCK AND ROLL
Much of the problem simply comes down to George Orwell’s sage warnings in his famous essay Politics and the English Language on the connection between imprecise thought and speech. After all, what a writer really means to say when he writes that “X country must find an off-ramp to Y conflict” is that he and his political confreres would much prefer that the conflict cease, and thus his use of imperatives is in fact an expression of this preference. But that same writer either can’t or won’t state this plainly, and thus makes recourse to some abstract objective claim in lieu of his own agency. In this way, it is the same as expressions involving the judgments of “history” or “posterity” that the speaker or writer seems always to imagine will be on his or her side.
To avoid the appearance of hypocrisy, I don’t want to say that such commentators “must” avoid these tired formulations. But it would really behoove them to rediscover the habits of describing politics and geopolitics in terms of clashing interests, even their own interests, rather than objective imperatives. Just say what you want to happen and why, and let the chips fall where they may. Try it, fellas. It’ll feel so good.
David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer and a research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. Find him at https://davidpolansky.substack.com.