Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.
The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.
Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.
Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation – at least in the foreign policy world – depend on context and relevance.
George Bernard Shaw: “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor.
Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.
A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.
Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning,” Bismarck had cautioned.
Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.
If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.
What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.
The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.
For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.
But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western powers’ rise.
United States would become the indispensable defender of the order Europe designed.
Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.
The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.
Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.