Educators From The United States

"We overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave... We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well."

"When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States."

"If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable."

"Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat."

"I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand."

"China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States."

"I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020."

"Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity."

"The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves for the foreseeable future."

"In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time."

"When World War II started on September 1, 1939, the German army contained 3.74 million soldiers and 103 divisions."

"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."

"When an aggressor comes on the scene, at least one other state will eventually take direct responsibility for checking it."

"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."

"This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics."

"The Soviet Union and its empire disappeared in large part because its smokestack economy could no longer keep up with the technological progress of the world's major economic powers."

"Important benefits often accrue to states that behave in an unexpected way."

"Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak."

"The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all."

"States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might."

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

"Decapitation is a fanciful strategy."

"The German air offensives against British cities in World Wars I and II not only failed to coerce the United Kingdom to surrender, but Germany also lost both wars."

"Specifically, the presence of oceans on much of the earth's surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony."

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

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

"A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth."

"In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume the burden. He guessed right."

"Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states."

"In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant."

"The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place."

"The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way."

"The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival."

"I've been to China many times, I love going to China, I love the Chinese people and in fact I'm more at home intellectually in China than I am in the west, because the Chinese are basically realists, whereas in the west people are instinctively liberal and they instinctively don't like realism, because it's such a pessimistic way of thinking about the world in past years. [...] When I've gone to China I've often started my Talks by saying it's good to be back among my people, I don't speak a word of Chinese and I feel like I'm a fish out of water culturally, when I'm in China. But intellectually the Chinese are my kind of people, they're realists very interested in theory, I've never gone to any country where people are more interested in international relations theory and talking about the big issues."

"We have a huge amount of evidence that it was nato expansion and the more general policy of making Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia’s border that motivated him to attack on February 24th... For Putin to have said time after time that nato, that Ukraine in nato, was an existential threat to Russia, when in fact it wasn’t, and this was all done to disguise the real motive, which was to incorporate Ukraine into a greater Russia for the purposes of satisfying his imperial ambitions is an argument that is just not supported by the historical record. Putin was very clear, as were all his lieutenants, that their great fear was that Ukraine was becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s borders. For them, that was an existential threat. It was simply unacceptable."

"For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected and pro-Russian president —which he rightly labeled a "coup"— was the final straw."

"Furthermore there's the whole argument that the administration made, that so many people were killed by chemical weapons. Their number was around 1,400, the fact of the matter is that over 40,000 other people were killed with bombs and bullets, before those 1,400 people. If 40,000 people were killed, and that didn't provide a moral justification for intervention, what's the moral justification for killing people... when 1,400 die with chemical weapons. I don't get it, in fact, I don't think there's a moral case to be made for intervention."

"... after the war, he became a big proponent of the argument that chemical warfare or gas warfare was actually a more humane form of warfare than shrapnel and bombs, because he saw what all those shrapnel and bombs did to all the boys who climbed out of the trenches and tried to cross no man's land, with German machine guns and artillery on the other side, he said I'll take the gas any day. I'm not making the case for gas warfare, but the idea that getting killed by gas is, more horrible than getting ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets is not one I buy. And when I see the Obama administration putting pictures of people killed by gas up on the internet, I say "let's put pictures of the people who got killed by shrapnel up there, and lets have a debate about which pictures look worse". It won't even be an interesting debate, getting killed by shrapnel, in my opinion is a lot more gruesome and a lot worse."

"...If China continues to rise, you better be very careful, because that will drive the United States stark raving crazy...."

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

"While Paul Pigors contends that the main purpose of administration is to preserve the status quo in society, Brooks Adams regards administration as a chief agent of social change."

"Twenty years later, Professor Wallace B. Donham, Dean of the Graduate School of Business at Harvard University, repeated that "if our civilization breaks down, it will be mainly a breakdown of administration";" and authorities in the field of public administration like Professor John M. Gaus of the Graduate School of Public Administration at Harvard and Dean of the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University have quoted Brooks Adams's view."

"Brooks Adams advocated that the chief function of administration should be to facilitate social change, or paradoxical as it may seem, to assure social stability by facilitating social change. Great-grandson of President John Adams, grandson of President Quincy Adams, brother of the "educated" Henry Adams, Brooks Adams produced, during the early 1900'S, a series of unorthodox historical essays. Their titles were more radical than their contents: The Law of Civilization and Decay, "The Collapse of Capitalistic Government," and The Theory of Social Revolutions. The last of these is quoted below; the first was regarded by Theodore Roosevelt as a "melancholy" but "powerful" book with "a very ugly element of truth.""

"It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment even in slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Administration is the capacity of coordinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is possibly the highest faculty of the human mind."

"There can be no doubt that the modem environment is changing faster than any environment ever previously changed; therefore, the social center of gravity constantly tends to shift more rapidly; and therefore modem civilization has unprecedented need of the administrative or generalizing mind. I take it to be an axiom, that perfection in administration must be commensurate to the bulk and momentum of the mass to be administered, otherwise the centrifugal will overcome the centripetal force, and the mass will disintegrate. In other words, civilization will dissolve. A moment arrives when the minds of any given dominant type fail to meet the demands made upon them, and are superseded by a younger type, which in tum is set aside by another still younger, until the limit of the administrative genius of that particular race has been reached. Then disintegration sets in, the social momentum is gradually relaxed, and society sinks back to a level at which it can cohere."

"The present industrial era brought with it a new governing class, as every considerable change in human environment must bring with it a governing class to give it expression. Perhaps, for lack of a recognized name, I may describe this class as the industrial capitalistic class, composed in the main of administrators and bankers. I conjecture that this class attained its acme of popularity and power, at least in America, toward the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Almost at the opening of the present century a progressively rigorous opposition found for its mouthpiece the President of the Union himself. If Mr. Roosevelt became, what his adversaries are pleased to call, an agitator, his agitation had a cause which is as deserving of study as is the path of a cyclone."

"Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation."

"Seek and possess holiness, and consolation will follow, as assuredly as warmth follows the dispensation of the rays of the sun."

"Do right! and thou hast naught to fear; Right hath a power that makes thee strong. The night is dark, but light is near; The grief is short, the joy is long."

"There is no moral authority for government other than to enforce the Universal Ethic."