Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

The China of the 1970s was a communist dictatorship. The China of the twenty-first century is a one-party state without a firm ideological foundation, more similar to Mexico under the PRI than Russia under Stalin. But the measurement of the political and the economic evolution has not yet been completed, and is one of the weak points of the system.

Iraq has to be made an international, and not just a national American problem.

I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.

Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?