In Geo-Politics, a nation has no permanent allies or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
George FriedmanThe computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.
George FriedmanTags: knowledge technology computers
Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.
George FriedmanTags: anger
The Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue demands that one honor one's mother and father. That is not about calling home. It is about this: Their God is your God, their friends are your friends, their debts are your debts, their enemies are your enemies and their fate is your fate.
George FriedmanEuropeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.
George FriedmanTags: foreign-policy leadership
The great presidents never forget the principles of the republic and seek to preserve and enhance them--in the long run--without undermining the needs of the moment. Bad presidents simply do what is expedient, heedless of principles. But the worst presidents are those who adhere to principles regardless of what the fortunes of the moment demand.
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In preventing the unintended empire from destroying the republic, the critical factor will not be the balance of power among the branches of government, but rather a president who is committed to that constitutional balance, yet willing to wield power in his own right. In orderr to do this, the president must grasp the insufficiency of both the idealist and the realist positions. The idealists, whether of the neoconservative or the liberal flavor, don't understand that it is necessary to master the nature of power in order to act according to moral principles. The realists don't understand the futility of power without a moral core.
President Obama dropped the term 'war on terror', and rightly so. Terrorism is not an enemy but a type of warfare that may or may not be adopted by an enemy. Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, an attack that relied on aircraft carriers, President Roosevelt had declared a global war on naval aviation. By focusing on terrorism instead of al Qaeda or radical Islam, Bush elevated a specific kind of assault to a position that shaped American global strategy, which left the United States strategically off-balance.
Obama may have clarified the nomenclature, but he left in place a significant portion of the imbalance, which is an obsession with the threat of terrorist attacks. As we consider presidential options in the coming decade, it appears imperative that we clear up just how much of a threat terrorism actually presents and what that threat means for U.S. policy.
It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious.
George FriedmanI had a son in 1976. When I went to Europe, I met an Italian and we became friends. We would talk about what we would tell our families to do if the balloon went up. The conversation -- strange and perhaps pathological as it was -- bound us together. It was not war, it was not peace, but it was a place in the mind where the preparation for war and the anxiety that it generated created strange forms, such as plans for the movement of children in order to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
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