38 Quotes by Thomas P.M. Barnett

The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning, they want to dig a hole, and they want to kill something.

Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force - as in tens of millions strong - of wifeless men who'll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones.

America has remained highly engaged in global affairs throughout decades of growing energy dependency, so it's hard to imagine it would disengage if its quest for energy self-sufficiency failed - especially amidst a world of heightened resource competition.

We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment. We all want to leave the planet in decent shape for our kids. Radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not necessarily the best way to achieve that.

Transnational terrorism, in the form of the Salafi Jihadist movement, is fundamentally a function of globalization.

Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.

The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today's wars but rather tomorrow's wars.

If you can get out in front of people with your ideas and your execution, you'll attract the people who need to be pulled in.

China's headlong rush to industrialize was pursued with the most Marxist of prejudices - bending nature to man's will. That's a desperately hard trick to pull off when one fifth of humanity, having previously subsisted on 7 percent of the world's freshwater supply, decides that it wants to instantaneously increase its caloric intake.