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...
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...
Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
As Berlin writes, in his reproach to the historians Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, nations and civilizations, while they exist, are not as concrete as the individuals who embody them.6 Individuals...
The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.
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...
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.
In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed.
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...
You don’t grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.
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...
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 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...
That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy,
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.