Michael Mandelbaum Quotes

Great powers engage.

Throughout history, the chief arbiter of the influence of nations and cultures has been war.

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?

Nations, great nations have limitations. All nations have limitations. Even great powers have limitations.

What really matters for great powers is power—national economic and military strength—and that speaks loudly and clearly for itself.

All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence.

There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation.

'Peace through Strength' only works if you have and show strength.

Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states.

American power remains today what it was in the Second World War and the Cold War: the greatest force for freedom in the world.

The amount of military force necessary to provide reassurance depends on how dangerous people think the world is. And that I think ultimately depends upon the kinds of government that hold sway in major countries.

American power worldwide is at its historic zenith.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

If Japan had been near to either England or France, war would have broken out long ago.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

In any case, fighting will not settle whether the claims were just or unjust. It will only settle which nation can mobilize and handle its fighting forces and its economic forces the better.

A great amount has been talked and written about what constitutes a sufficient balance and what really is meant by the concepts of 'balance' and 'deterrence'.

Each particular society begins to feel its strength, whence arises a state of war between different nations.

Mr. Chamberlain desires to avert the threat to England's peace by making England, in alliance with Germany, stronger than her rivals and so to force them to renounce their hostile intentions against her.

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.

Once you start a war, you have to win.

I would prefer to abandon the terminology of the past. 'Superpower' is something which we used during the cold war time. Why use it now?

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.