Jamie Smith

“Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century