Fareed Zakaria Quotes

Americans tend to see U.S. primacy as beneficial to both their country and the rest of the world.

Power is the true reserve currency in international affairs.

We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so.

The United States influences government and life everywhere else.

Europe is perhaps the first example in history of a non-dominant world power.

It’s not a dictatorship in the United States. But it is dictatorial to the rest of the world. Who’s going to say no?

Unilateralism will lead to the decline of American Power.

Never before has the gap between American power and its legitimacy been so great.

Americans do not recognize the effect of American power in the world. … People all over the world ask, “Why can’t Americans see how American power affects us?”

We have to really get used to the fact that there is more than one center in the world politics, that the unipolar world never succeeded, that there are more growing, emerging, economic, financial powers…

So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.

My priority is to give the United States the kind of influence it should have.

American power worldwide is at its historic zenith.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

With the rise of America, the global balance of power shifted away from the old European powers.

America is different. It irks and domineers. But it does not conquer. It tries to call the shots and bend the rules, but it does not go to war for land and glory.

American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism.

A superpower does not have to be the bully on the block.

For the 30 years I have been involved with U. S. national security, our policy has been shaped by the assumption that we could shape other countries’ policies throughout the world. This has always been a bit of a myth.

Europe’s slow political decline has been disguised for decades by American power.

... we Americans know and we observe the differences between world leadership and imperialism.

The U. S. is not the Boss, not the Boss any longer.

Who does he think the fucking superpower is?