International Relations

"Although life expectancy has increased in the third world, the report links a number of crucial issues to a dysfunctional global economy and provides shocking statistics on the lack of access to medical care, clean water and sanitation."

"In identifying these mutual interests, the report suggests that there is insufficient public knowledge of the facts. The media often reports on the threat that the South’s growing industries pose to the North’s markets, without mentioning the North’s markets in the South, and how trading with the South accounts for a large share of jobs in the North and keeps prices affordable for consumers.The report underlines the political reasons for working against mutual interest. In order to redress the imbalance, it must be accepted that both sides cannot benefit equally - a fact which often cases prevents successful economic negotiations."

"A convincing argument of how economic growth in the South has a directly positive global effect is put forward. A large scale transfer of funds from the North to the South would have an anti-inflationary effect on the North, would help the world economy out of recession in the short-term and contribute to greater growth in the long-term. Overall this would significantly expand world trade and directly support growth in developing countries, thereby increasing economic prosperity and employment in the North, and stabilizing financial markets."

"The Brandt commission emphasizes the need for bringing East and West together to meet the global development problems that affect all. For example, it is said to propose, at least for consideration, a new "world development fund" with universal membership and universal taxes. Unlike the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, this fund... would provide loans for general rather than specially targeted use, and would give borrowers and lenders greater equality in reaching decisions."

"The Commission argues that although the nature of internal structural reform will vary widely from country to country, economic development will require a profound transformation of the entire international economic system. They emphasize the importance of human dignity, security, justice and equity as equally valid measures of development as financial betterment."

"Support for international agricultural research institutions should be expanded with greater emphasis given to regional cooperation"

"Trafficked children and women are at risk of all manner of ills... for there to be fundamental and lasting change, the extreme levels of inequality and social injustice within Indian society need to be addressed and, as the visionary Brandt Report made clear, the most effective way to do this is through the equitable sharing of resources, knowledge and wealth."

"The Brandt Equation reintroduces the Brandt Commission's vision for a sustainable global economy. It stresses that the fortunes of global society are more encompassing than the fortunes of any individual, group or nation – for debt or solvency, for depression or prosperity, for wars of redistribution or for peace."

"With populations shifting away from the countryside and into cities, alongside high birth rates and widespread unemployment and poverty, up to two-thirds of all families in some third world cities remain unable to afford basic housing."

"Striving economies of the poorer nations, reliant upon their agricultural exports, are faced with an unfavorable international trade regime and erratic markets, which undermine their ability to promote structural transformation."

"Acknowledging the massive inequality between sexes in the developing world, the commission argue that development depends upon women and criticizes many aspects of modernization which only serve to reinforce the dominant role of men in society. This is especially the case in production oriented societies. An important objective of any developmental project should be to encourage the education and employment of women by freeing them from tasks such as fetching water and firewood from sources which are many miles away. Even the distribution of healthcare is biased against women, especially pregnant women, since decision making processes are almost always in the hands of men. The commission argue that the role of women is fundamental to society and yet statistically their value is not taken into account."

"The report highlights how protectionism in the North restricts the South’s access to markets. This then has an inflationary impact on the North as consumers pay more for their goods. The result is that the South does not have the funds to buy from the North, fueling recession and unemployment in the North, since the industrialized nations are largely dependent upon selling to the markets in the South. North-South trade is a two way street."

"Other proposals expected in the report include means of ensuring: Financing for poorer countries, such as an international tax on trade, ocean minerals, and weapons sales; Aid by richer countries, such as a commitment to live up to the long-gone promise to supply .7 percent of gross national product, rising to one percent by the year 2000; A sufficiency of food, through a program for increased production and improved distribution; A sufficiency of energy, through international agreement on pricing, conservation, production, and other matters serving the needs of both producers and consumers of energy resources; Enhancement of trade, through removing trade barriers and establishing more commodities agreements to stabilize prices."

"The extent and consequences of poverty in poorer countries is highlighted; the World Bank estimate that 800 million people in the third world lived in absolute poverty at the time, some 40 % of the South’s population not being able to secure the most basic necessities of life. A differentiation is made between poverty in the North, where the relatively high levels of wealth could be redistributed more effectively, and the acute poverty of the South, where there is less wealth to redistribute and very little opportunity to acquire more."

"The cat's out of the bag... So now we have to deal with the aftermath."

"It has not been a great week. I know that I should have handled this better, I could have handled this better... I know there are lessons to learn and I will learn them... Don't blame Number 10 Downing Street or nameless advisers, blame me... I want to be open... I was obviously very angry about what people were saying about my dad. I loved my dad, I miss him every day... He was a wonderful father and I'm very proud of everything he did. But I mustn't let that cloud the picture. The facts are these: I bought shares in a unit trust, shares that are like any other sorts of shares and I paid taxes on them in exactly the same way... I sold those shares. In fact, I sold all the shares that I owned, on becoming prime minister... Later on I will be publishing the information that goes into my tax return, not just for this year but the years gone past because I want to be completely open and transparent about these things... I will be the first prime minister, the first leader of a major political party, to do that and I think it is the right thing to do."

"John Doe: Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data? Süddeutsche Zeitung: We're very interested. John Doe: There are a couple of conditions. My life is in danger. We will only chat over encrypted files. No meeting, ever. The choice of stories is obviously up to you. Süddeutsche Zeitung: Why are you doing this? John Doe: I want to make these crimes public. Süddeutsche Zeitung: How much data are we talking about? John Doe: More than anything you have ever seen."

"In tax havens, boundaries between what’s legal and illegal become very blurred. The recent leak on the Panama Papers revealed how international leaders, celebrities and businessmen from all over the world were using offshore companies to avoid making their assets public and, in some cases, potentially to dodge tax or hide illegal activities. Panama is where criminal capitalism and legal capitalism become one."

"Everything I’m doing is legal, it’s a perfectly legitimate structure."

"In the vagueness and vastness of this ambition, open-ended with a vengeance, realism dissolves itself into a potentially all-purpose justification of any of the adventures conducted in the name of liberalism."

"So here’s the puzzle: Realist advice has performed better than its main rivals over the past two-and-a-half decades, yet realists are largely absent from prominent mainstream publications."

"A theory that holds that states are differentiated within the system solely by their relative power position cannot possibly deal successfully with this history or its outcome, any more than Newtonian physics can work for quantum mechanics. This neo-realist assumption, like its view of the unchanging, repetitive nature of balance-of-power politics and outcomes throughout the ages, may make its theory of international politics simple, parsimonious, and elegant; they also make it, for the historian at least, unhistorical, unusable, and wrong."

"Due to my poor English and lack of prior knowledge, I failed his midterm exam. Ken called me to his office and told me that he understood my situation and would not count the midterm grade if I got a better grade on the final. He then spent a half-hour tutoring me on the concept of power and the idea of "system structure." Among other things, he told me that he disliked the label "neorealism" because he felt that the term told you nothing about the theory itself. Instead, he preferred "structural realism" because it described the substance of his theory."

"If power does not reliably bring control, what does it do for you? Four things, primarily. First, power provides the means of maintaining one's autonomy in the face of force that others wield. Second, greater power permits wider ranges of action, while leaving the outcomes of action uncertain. […] Third, the more powerful enjoy wider margins of safety in dealing with the less powerful and have more to say about which games will be played and how. […] Fourth, great power gives its possessors a big stake in their system and the ability to act for its sake. For them management becomes both worthwhile and possible."

"The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies."

"Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values. In the seventeenth century, France under Cardinal Richelieu introduced the modern approach to international relations, based on the nation-state and motivated by national interest as its ultimate purpose. In the eighteenth century, Great Britain elaborated the concept of the balance of power, which dominated European diplomacy for the next 200 years. In the nineteenth century, Metternich’s Austria reconstructed the Concert of Europe and Bismarck’s Germany dismantled it, reshaping European diplomacy into a coldblooded game of power politics. In the twentieth century, no country has influenced international relations as decisively and at the same time as ambivalently as the United States. No society has more firmly insisted on the inadmissibility of intervention in the domestic affairs of other states, or more passionately asserted that its own values were universally applicable. No nation has been more pragmatic in the day-to-day conduct of its diplomacy, or more ideological in the pursuit of its historic moral convictions. No country has been more reluctant to engage itself abroad even while undertaking alliances and commitments of unprecedented reach and scope."

"States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power."

"In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

"Look at today’s politicians... keen to be viewed as the virile leaders of their respective countries; eager to inflate their image by harming migrants and refugees, the most vulnerable in society... If we do not change course quickly, we will inevitably encounter an incident where that first domino is tipped—triggering a sequence of unstoppable events that will mark the end of our time on this tiny planet..."

"Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute."

"The international rules-based order that’s critical to maintaining peace and security is being put to the test by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin’s attacks are inflicting an ever-increasing toll on civilians there. Hundreds if not thousands of Ukrainians have been killed, many more wounded, as have citizens of other countries. More than a million refugees have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries. Millions of people across Ukraine are trapped in increasingly dire conditions as Russia destroys more critical infrastructure. For example, Mariupol’s mayor says that most of the besieged city’s residents are living without water, without electricity, without heat. Bridges to the city have been destroyed. Women, children, growing ranks of wounded civilians cannot get out. Food and medical supplies cannot get in. The mayor wrote today, and I quote, “We are simply being destroyed.” The world has seen Russia use these grisly tactics before in Syria, in Chechnya. Meanwhile, Russia’s reckless operation around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant risked a catastrophe, a nuclear incident. The Kremlin should immediately cease all attacks around Ukrainian nuclear facilities and allow civilian personnel to do their work to ensure the facility’s safety and security, as both the IAEA director general and a resolution adopted yesterday by the agency’s board of governors have called on Russia to do."

"Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves."

"To build a theory of international relations on accidents of geography and history is dangerous."

"According to the first image of international relations, the locus of the important causes of war is found in the nature and behavior of man. Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity."

"Where new geopolitical tensions between countries flare up, we will continue to offer a trusted, secure platform to keep police information flowing and ensure criminals cannot hide within the rifts that a more fragmented world can create."

"It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

"We must distinguish between military and political power. Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of any of these."

"The bipolar world is over, but it not going to be replaced by a unipolar world empire that the United States controls alone. The world is already economically multipolar, and there will be a diffusion of power as the information revolution progresses, interdependence increases, and transnational actors become more important. The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that."

"Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is."

"In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi."

"A potential hegemon, as emphasized throughout this book, must be wealthier than any of its regional rivals and must possess the most powerful army in the area."

"The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim."

"Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone."

"Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure. V`Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion — between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking."

""Populists" believe in conspiracies and one of the most enduring is that a secret group of international bankers and capitalists, and their minions, control the world's economy."

"History moves in contradictions. The skeleton of historic existence, the economic structure of society, also develops in contradictions. Forms eternally follow forms. Everything has only a passing being. The dynamic force of life creates the new over and over again — such is the law inherent in reality."

"The challenge we face is how to integrate the Muslim world into the global economy. Asia has become part of it, but not Africa or the Middle East.One could realistically think about a Marshall Plan with respect to this part of the world, to succeed in integrating the Muslim and Arab world into the global economy as we did in Europe after World War II. For example, we’ve wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq war. Had we taken a third of this money and invested it into a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, the benefits would have been ten times more than wasting it on a war."

"If my theoretical studies have contained any subjective value judgment, then this has amounted at most to a preference for freedom and progress rather than state control of the economy and distribution of such scanty prosperity as may be available for distribution at a given moment. I have wanted to make it clear that this preference is a great common interest of all parties, both in the management of the world economy and in every individual nation. Such a position may be attacked, but it cannot be denominated as party-politics in the ordinary sense."

"Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis."

"We know that to compete for the jobs of the 21st century and thrive in a global economy, we need a growing, skilled and educated workforce, particularly in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math."