The poets think about war more than the social scientists.

War and sex are what I call the two abysmal - by that I mean deep - parts of the human condition.

The Chinese central government will slowly and steadily lose authority while regional armies [gain power]. The Western powers are going to take sides to protect their investments - they have put billions of dollars into Shanghai. Their fear is that [these investments] are going to be expropriated by a warlord from the interior who will sweep down on Shanghai. They will try to form alliances with warlords to protect their concessions, and there will be a huge flow of weapons into China.

With the decline of American interests in the outcome of this region, there is no glue holding it together. And the countries in this region are invented ... The last guarantor of the region's borders was the United States, and the US has basically said "the hell with it." What you're really having is the collapse of nation-states because they're not nations. They're only states.

In a way, we can have a much easier discussion about the future of technology than we can about why a young man kills another man in a war.

The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human - community - originates in the inhumanity of war.

Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.