After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The United States doesn't do what it does in the world for altruistic reasons. Nobody set out to be the world's government.

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 war on terror, I believe, will be waged by effective intelligence and police work and cruise missiles.

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

The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power.

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.