States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might.

Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves.

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume the burden. He guessed right.

Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity.

Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak.

The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all.

The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place.