The pursuit of universal rights requires more than speeches. It requires power.

Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century. The United States is just beginning its cultural and historical journey.

And from this story I learned about the geopolitics of taking out one’s salami.

When you drill down and see the forces that are shaping nations, you can see that the menu from which they choose is limited.

A research division develops marketing material for its deal makers. We have no policy position. If you have a policy position you can’t possibly forecast.

I’m not a journalist. So I didn’t down and let Assad charm me. I didn’t walk away and say “my god he’s got an Apple computer and he really likes Beyonce so he must be a liberal.”

If you go through the list of things that are not possible you’re left with a very finite amount of possibilities. The fancy name for this is constraint theory. It’s a nonquantitative model, but it’s a field of mathematics.

Nations do not become strong because they feel like it but because they must.

In some sense, the military is the most modern part of a developing country.

Assad’s mother was a terror. He was terrified of her and she kept saying to him, you’re not like your father. That’s interesting, but it’s useless information. It doesn’t tell me anything about how the first and second armored brigades are going to operate.