Quotes from John Lewis Gaddis

Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.

There is no weapon so disarming and effective in relations with the communists as sheer honesty. They know very little about it.

self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving situations, more circumspect about their forecasting prowess, more accurate in recalling mistakes, less prone to rationalize those mistakes, more likely to update their beliefs in a timely fashion, and—as a cumulative result of these advantages—better positioned to affix realistic probabilities

But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post-Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn't. Containment had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a bumper sticker. The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: that's why Kennan's a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician.

After crossing the Rubicon—the real one—in 49

Augustine concluded that war, if necessary to save the state, could be a lesser evil than peace—and that the procedural prerequisites for necessity could be stated. Had provocation occurred? Had competent authority exhausted peaceful alternatives? Would the resort to violence be a means chosen, not an end in itself?

Kennan brooded about Europe's fragility and his own superficiality. "Americanism, like Bolshevism, is a disease which gains footing only in a weakened body," he concluded with youthful certainty.

It followed that anyone who could strengthen a fortification, repair a boat, power an oar, pay others to do these things, or even bring up a child who might someday do them, would be serving the state.

requiere cierta «visión de conjunto» que revele el significado y la relevancia de cada una de las partes. Los atenienses perdieron esa «visión de conjunto» en Sicilia. La asamblea

It's no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, "may have believed things we have either forgotten or never known; and we must keep open the possibility that in some respects, at least, they were wiser than we.

There were, of course, precedents for questioning the wisdom of war: Artabanus, Archidamus, and Nicias had all done that, if unsuccessfully, and Thucydides' doomed Melians had raised timeless misgivings about the conduct of wars once started. No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war.

Having navigated himself into unchallenged authority, he used it to turn a failing republic—as if it were a Virgilian vine—into an empire that flourishes

1969, doscientos estadounidenses morían semanalmente en Indochina. Cuando Vietnam del Sur se rindió, en 1975, habían muerto por salvar ese país 58. 213 soldados de Estados

Secretary of State Acheson had even announced publicly that the American "defensive perimeter" did not extend to South Korea.

El poder, no obstante, abre la puerta a cometer grandes idioteces.[36]

Vietnam del Sur se hundiría de un día para otro», advirtió John F. Kennedy a su auditorio en Texas, la mañana del 22 de noviembre de 1963. Y con Vietnam del Sur se desplomarían también las alianzas que Estados Unidos mantenía

I shall never be completely happy at it, for I shall never be able to do much thinking myself—and I have been just clever enough, in my youth, to mistrust everyone who tries to think for me.

Seguimos siendo la piedra angular de ese arco de libertad».[103]

THE COLD WAR changed all of that, with the result that Wilson is remembered today as a prophetic realist, while Lenin's statues molder in garbage dumps throughout the former communist world.

adaptaban mejor los objetivos a las capacidades, los atenienses o los espartanos? Y

The United States had no foreign policy, only the reflections of domestic politics internationally. There was no satisfaction in representing that. The country was succumbing to a consumerism in which people equated charm with the absence of halitosis, balanced competing claims about toothpaste, and fretted about whether their refrigerators ejected ice cubes or required an ice pick.

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.

existiera y nuestro terapeuta fue Tucídides.

les exigí que leyesen Guerra y paz hasta la última página.