Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems.
HENRY KISSINGERIn the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
More Henry Kissinger Quotes
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When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.
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If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.
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A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.
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The issues are too important to be left for the voters.
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For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.
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It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
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The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.
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order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.
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If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.
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Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.
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Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial.
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Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities (the Burkean view)?
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Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.
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A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security
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The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.
HENRY KISSINGER