State’s position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.
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 in...
While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that...
We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back m...
The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the...
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.
Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone, or else we will hunt you down wherever you are.
Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past...
Any act of intolerance, of ideological intransigence, or of proselytism exposes the beastly core of all enthusiasm….One can never stay far enough from the clutches of a prophet.
Panacea. This created a plethora of anomalies. The Syr
Idea of Central Europe has a fatal geographical flaw. Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve tell us, belongs to the crush zone that lays athwart Maritime Europe, with its oceanic interests,
Another case of America becoming a network of massive city-states more intimately interconnected with other continents than with their own hinterlands
There were just so many cafés now—bearing conceited names such as Charme, Rembrandt, La Muse—with their chairs and tables made of wicker, zinc, velvet, blond wood, and black metal, each establishment...
The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those wh...
The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, H...
Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks to...
Since the security benefits of hegemony are enormous in an anarchic system in which there is no world hegemon, powerful states will invariably be tempted to emulate the United States and try to domina...
Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.
Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia’s partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story. Russia
And so this is where the post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very totalitarism that we fought against in the decades following WWII might, in quite a few circumstances, be prefer...