Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.

Now we have a whole series of problems - energy, environment, proliferation - which go beyond the nation. And we also know that a conflict between major powers would be a catastrophe for which there is no compensation in anything you can gain.

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.

Even paranoid people have enemies.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has fourteen countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would involve in a disastrous for the peace of the world.