It is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up. Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in...
Democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can.
While our land forces are for unpredictable contingencies, our sea and air forces secure the global commons. The navy is our away team: its operations tempo around the world is the same, whether in pe...
We must move away from domain control to domain denial, since our only motive to be on the ground in the Greater Middle East and Central Asia is for smackdown or disruption purposes. (In retrospect, t...
Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea.
The revolution was a gift from God to the Romanian people. The Romanian people must now repay this gift by opening their hearts to people of all faiths, especially to those who suffered here in the pa...
The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media’s distorting mirror.
The debacle of the early years in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history, and culture really do set limits on what can be...
The United States, like any nation—but especially because it is a great power—simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embrace...
So far we have seen the weakening and collapse of small and medium-sized states in Africa and the Middle East. But quasi-anarchy in larger states like Russia and China, on which the territorial organi...
Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the I...
Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics—to the extent that it can be shaped—in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.
One marker, which I would read a bit later on, tells the familiar story of Narcissa Whitman, trail-blazer and martyred missionary, who followed the north side of the Platte in 1836 on horseback, becom...
Morgenthau begins his argument by noting that the world is the result of forces inherent in human nature. And, human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear ( phobos ), self-interest (...
Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).
Lincoln had risen to this pinnacle through migration, self-education, and hard work.
Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.
In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed.
If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—and consequently defending ourselves against—religious mov...
I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.