While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

The main division in the world is between democratic and undemocratic countries.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were spectacular, riveting, grim, costly and searing. The shock that they caused reverberated throughout the world. What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania ended the lives of thousands of people and changed the lives of many more. But they did not change the world.

The government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

The less oil the world uses, the less important the region that has so much of it becomes.