Quotes About Power

The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was "the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.

Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.

Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the Chinese in similar Mahanian terms.

America is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.

it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.

The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.

Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics—to the extent that it can be shaped—in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.

With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius's army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.

America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.

the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?

The United States, like any nation—but especially because it is a great power—simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and accepted.

state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.

Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.

The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.

It was trade routes, not the projection of military power, that emblemized the "Pax Mongolica."[

simply because a nation is a democracy does not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened than that of a dictatorship.

Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous

Croatia and Serbia will always seek to advance the interests of their ethnic compatriots in Bosnia, at the expense of each other and of the Bosnian Muslims, no matter who is in charge, democrat or autocrat. But

Robert D. Kaplan

Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland!

If the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?

This is to be a landscape meditation about America's place in the world.

Rich kids are more confident that they can influence government, and they are largely right about that.14 Not surprisingly, poor kids are less likely to try.

politicians were prisoners of misguided