So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.
The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.
Because the unchecked eastward advance into Manchuria and Korea of Russia – a country that, in Roosevelt’s words, “pursued a policy of consistent opposition to us in the East, and of literally fathomless mendacity” –.
Under the ayatollahs’ concept of policy, the dispute with the West is not a matter of specific technical concessions or negotiating formulas but a contest over the nature of world order.
Torn between obsessive insecurity and proselytizing zeal, between the requirements of Europe and the temptations of Asia, the Russian Empire always had a role in the European equilibrium but was never emotionally a part of it.
Spanish territory in Florida and Texas – the.
For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.
For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.
Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire’s truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.
Later I learned to improve my forecasting – if necessary by asking the visitor in advance what subjects he intended to raise with Nixon. In.
Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation’s strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.
If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.
China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.
But unlike Machiavelli, Confucius was concerned more with the cultivation of social harmony than with the machinations of power. His themes were the principles of compassionate rule, the performance of correct rituals, and the inculcation of filial piety.
America must distill a common understanding with a country that is the central eventual prize targeted by both the Sunni and the Shia versions of jihad and whose efforts, however circuitous, will be essential in fostering a constructive regional evolution.
Holy war occasionally moves the already powerful to even greater efforts; it is doomed, however, whenever it flouts strategic or political realities. And the impetus of the age was national identity and national interests, not global jihad.
In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.
Like the United States, China thought of itself as playing a special role. But it never espoused the American notion of universalism to spread its values around the world. It.
Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development.
In the Chinese version of exceptionalism, China did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them.