It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

The closer one gets to either the eastern or the southern fringe of the German-speaking world-the closer one gets, in other words, to the threatening and more numerous Slavs-the more insecure and dangerous nationalism becomes.

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.

While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria – half a world away from the United States – more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United States’ southern border, Mexico will affect America’s destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East.