To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.

My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.

Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.

The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.

For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.

In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.