Bipartisanship helps to avoid extremes and imbalances. It causes compromises and accommodations. So let's cooperate.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Pakistan's political instability is its greatest vulnerability, and a decline in U.S. power would reduce America's ability to aid Pakistan's consolidation and development.
The legitimacy of the leadership depends on what that country thinks of its leaders.
War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.
Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions: Western Europe and East Asia.
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?
I don't approve of the notion that we should be announcing who should step down from the position of a head of a state unless we are seriously prepared to remove that person. But if we are not, if we are being prudent and careful, then let's also be careful with how we talk.
Commitment and credibility go hand in hand.
Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions, and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue.
The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.
Human affairs require some combination of moral commitment with disciplined political action. And that is what keeps me intrigued and challenged and wanting to influence events.
Moderation and bipartisan consensus go hand in hand.
The future is inherently full of discontinuities, and lessons of the past must be applied with enormous caution.
Basically, I see Iran as an authentic nation-state. And that authentic identity gives it cohesion, which most of the Middle East lacks.
It is important to ask ourselves, as citizens, whether a world power can provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety.
Americans must place greater emphasis on the more subtle dimensions of national power, such as innovation, education, the balance of force and diplomacy, and the quality of political leadership.
I'm all in favour of grand important speeches, but the president then has to link his sermons to a strategy.
Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers.
Anniversaries are like birthdays: occasions to celebrate and to think ahead, usually among friends with whom one shares not only the past but also the future.
The worsening of relations between a declining America and an internally troubled Mexico could even give rise to a particularly ominous phenomenon: the emergence, as a major issue in nationalistically aroused Mexican politics, of territorial claims justified by history and ignited by cross-border incidents.
The Sino-American competition involves two significant realities that distinguish it from the Cold War: neither party is excessively ideological in its orientation; and both parties recognize that they really need mutual accommodation.
War triggers unforeseeable military dynamics and sets off massive political shocks, creating new problems as well as new opportunities.
Sovereignty is a word that is used often but it has really no specific meaning. Sovereignty today is nominal. Any number of countries that are sovereign are sovereign only nominally and relatively.
America's victory in the Cold War was not without painful social costs.
The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied, despite the understandable sensitivities that such a conclusion provokes among the tenderhearted in the West and some of the former leaders of the defeated side.
AIPAC has consistently opposed a two-state solution, and a lot of members of Congress have been intimidated, and I don't think that's healthy.
It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam.
Neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution in the Middle East.
The financial catastrophe of 2008 nearly precipitated a calamitous economic depression, jolting America and much of the West into a sudden recognition of their systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed.
Japan needs the American market and it also needs American security protection. Japan also needs America as the necessary stabilizer of an orderly world system with economies truly open to international trade.
Americans don't learn about the world; they don't study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don't study geography.
I cite these events because I think they underline two very disturbing phenomena - the loss of U.S. international credibility, the growing U.S. international isolation.
We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
If we can deter the Soviet Union, if we can deter North Korea, why on earth can't we deter Iran?
I think it is important to ask ourselves as citizens, not as Democrats attacking the administration, but as citizens, whether a world power can really provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety?
You go to Paris, or you go to Portugal, you go to Poland, and you ask, 'Who are you people?' They'll tell you, we're Portuguese, we're Spanish, we're Polish. Who are the people that are really European? The people in Brussels, in the E.U. bureaucracy. Europe has not been able to move to the level of patriotic identification with the concept.
You know who's messianic? Netanyahu, because he talks that way. And that's a very risky position.
Yes, ISIS is a threat. It's more than a nuisance. It's also in many respects criminal violence. But it isn't, in my view, a central strategic issue facing humanity.
Because America is a democracy, public support for presidential foreign-policy decisions is essential.
Foreign policy should not be justified through making oneself feel good, but through results that have tangible consequences.
If the United States and China can accommodate each other on a broad range of issues, the prospects for stability in Asia will be greatly increased.
I think we have to pay attention to the Arab masses not just in the Gulf States, but also in the hinterlands.
We all have the right to comment about each other.
We defended our allies in Europe for 40 years during the worst days of the Cold War - very threatening days of the Cold War - and nothing happened. So deterrence does work.
The external Soviet empire lasted 45 years. It is shattered, beyond redemption or repair.
We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.
We can't have an intelligent foreign policy unless we have an intelligent public, because we're a democracy.
One-sided national economic triumphs cannot be achieved in the increasingly interwoven global economy without precipitating calamitous consequences for everyone.
Only a dynamic and strategically-minded America, together with a unifying Europe, can jointly promote a larger and more vital West, one capable of acting as a responsible partner to the rising and increasingly assertive East.
