Quotes from John Lewis Gaddis

If there is one great power, and the great power has taken upon itself the right to preempt and is choosing for itself when and in what circumstances it's going to do that, obviously it leads people in the rest of the world to wonder how far this doctrine extends.

Lightness of being," then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry.

Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity. Transparency, for this reason, was vital: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing." Athenians found "the fruits of other countries" to be "as familiar a luxury as those of [their] own." The walls made their citizenship global.

The prudent leader "dreads and reflects on everything that can happen to him but is bold when he is in the thick of action." Xerxes listens patiently, but objects that "if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.

Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died. Victory could hardly have been purchased at greater cost: the U.S.S.R. in 1945 was a shattered state, fortunate to have survived. The war, a contemporary observer recalled, was "both the most fearful and the proudest memory of the Russian people."2

The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.

And, hence, to manage it. For if, as Thucydides warned two thousand years earlier, words in crises can lose their meaning, leaving in the "ability to see all sides of a question [an] incapacity to act on any,"82

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.

Common sense is like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets.

Reassuring withdrawals, Clausewitz writes in On War, "are very rare." More often armies and nations fail to distinguish orderly disengagements from abject capitulations—or foresight from fear.

H]istory is arguably the best method of enlarging experience in such a way as to command the widest possible consensus on what the significance of that experience might be

They went from regarding these compromises as regrettable to considering them necessary, then normal, then even desirable.

You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters… with the strength of faith…. You must be strong with the strength of hope…. You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death…. When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with faith in man…. There is therefore no need to fear.89

I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities," one Soviet official explained in 1973.

And he distrusts novices who, without theory, will lack judgment, which must work "like a ship's compass," recording "the slightest variations" from courses set, "however rough the sea.

lies in the possibility that the Founders left the Union to test itself: knowing the need to proportion aspirations to capabilities, recognizing the incompatibilities in good things, they chose to save their new state, and leave to their descendants the saving of its soul.

Whatever God thought about it, the old dictator's ghost was not so easily exorcized after all.

For just as no politics can be pure, so no "grand strategy" will remain unaffected by the unforeseen.

Complexity fully rendered would take too long and contain too much, thereby entangling judgment. Complexity as what you want or expect would only confirm what you think you know. You need something in between.

Like poles on tightropes, temperament makes the difference between slips and safe arrivals.

Just what Khrushchev intended to do with his Cuban missiles is, even now, unclear: it was characteristic of him not to think things through.

An artist, when sketching, looks at a landscape and then a sketch pad, repeating the process until an image appears, depicting, but not duplicating, what's there. Landscape and sketch pad guide the artist's hand, but no two artists will sketch the scene in just the same way.

Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." Kennan saw in them the need to regard Bolshevism, "with all its hullabaloo about revolution," not as a turning point in history, but as only another milepost in Russia's "wasteful, painful progress from an obscure origin to an obscure destiny." Nothing in Brown's dispatches or in Kennan's training, however, anticipated the horrors of Stalinism. If