Grand Strategy Quotes

“One does not have to be without sin to castigate someone else for being a rapist or murderer" (386).”
― Kenneth Pollack, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy

“Grand strategy is about marrying ends to means, about doing what you can, consistent with the nation's capabilities and resources.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World

“I’ll define that term, for the purposes of this book, as the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. If you see ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means. Expanding means may attain more ends, but not all ends can be infinite and means never can be. Whatever balance you strike, there’ll be a link between what’s real and what’s imagined: between your current location and your intended destination. You won’t have a strategy until you’ve connected these dots—dissimilar though they are—within the situation in which you’re operating.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy