Quotes About Diplomacy

Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945: We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that "The only way to have a friend is to be one." We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.

Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao.

What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it.

For centuries, the Middle Kingdom had assured its security by playing off distant barbarians against immediate neighbors. Deeply worried about Soviet expansionism, Mao adopted the same strategy in his opening to the United States.

Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China's peer.

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.

when Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated.

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.

framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent. Can today's leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?

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

Cold War. China, though technically an ally of the Soviet Union, was in quest of maneuvering

If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.

In the Chinese version of exceptionalism, China did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them.

Whenever peace--conceived as the avoidance of war--has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community.

The logic of war is power, and power has no inherent limit. The logic of peace is proportion, and proportion implies limitation.

What Nixon sought throughout the Cold War was a stable international order for a world filled with nuclear weapons.

Não fizeram qualquer esforço para incluir a vizinha Rússia, que na época, findo o pesadelo de um «tempo de dificuldades», reconstruía a sua própria ordem consagrando princípios em clara contradição com o equilíbrio vestefaliano: um único soberano absoluto, uma ortodoxia religiosa unificada, e um programa de expansão territorial em todas as direções.

The ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state.

Em período de convulsões generalizadas, um país onde seja preservada a autoridade doméstica fica em boa posição para explorar o caos dos Estados vizinhos em benefício de objetivos internacionais mais elevados.

elemento indispensável do sucesso de uma política externa é uma estratégia de longo prazo fundada numa análise rigorosa de todos os fatores relevantes.

É a pureza, e não a estabilidade, o princípio fundador desta conceção de ordem mundial.

Russian rulers appealed to their people on the basis of their endurance, not their greatness. Russian diplomacy relied, to an extraordinary extent, on superior power. Russia rarely had allies among countries where it had not stationed military forces. Russian diplomacy tended to be power-oriented, tenaciously holding on to fixed positions and transforming foreign policy into trench warfare.

Quando os Estados não são governados em toda a sua extensão é a própria ordem internacional ou regional que começa a desintegrar-se.