Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.

Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War.

Obviously, what's happening in China right now is crucial, in the party congress, which as someone said has anointed a new emperor of China in President Xi. So there's the rise of China, and their active involvement in the United States internally in our business and financial realms. That certainly bears watching.

The rapid rise of the People's Republic of China as a military and economic power is challenging the status quo.

Russia comes from a place of deep resentment against the West, in general, and the United States in particular. They are rapacious, because they want back as much of their empire as they can grab. And we need to resist that. At the same time, we should be able to look for areas of common interest.

In the past, Germany could rely on the French, the British and, especially, the Americans, to assert our interests in the world. We have always criticized the U.S. for being the global police, and it was often appropriate to do so. But we are now seeing what happens when the U.S. pulls back. If the U.S. leaves the room, other powers immediately walk in. In Syria, it's Russia and Iran. In trade policy, it's China. These examples show that, ultimately, we are no longer achieving either - neither the dissemination of our European values nor the advancement of our interests.

We've been in a period of relative stability and cooperation since the end of the Cold War among the world's major powers, but that may not always exist. And certainly one could even predict that there will be periods of hostility or tension ahead.

The US is the wrecking machine that is destroying everything. The world is hoping that China will somehow come to the rescue.

Washington sees the various local and national conflicts in the Middle East as part of a battle for regional hegemony between the U.S. and Iran.

The world is shifting from a hegemonic era, where the United States dominated alone, to a multipolar system.

For the Kremlin, it is more feasible to preserve its great-power status in cooperation with the United States than in confrontation.

Every country that's ever been the most powerful country in the world ceases to be the most powerful country in the world at some point.

The world is fortunate - for the time being, at least - that it has an American president in Obama who is prepared to take a conciliatory and concessive attitude towards America's decline and that it has a Chinese leadership which has been extremely cautious about expressing an opinion, let alone flexing its muscles.

The United States and Russia probably do not have common aims and dreams, but they have common worries: Both Washington and Moscow are concerned about the rise of China and are threatened by the rise of radical Islam.

President Obama's consistent agenda has been to weaken the United States and our allies in pursuit of a more 'balanced' global power structure.

The rise of China as a new power is another great challenge for the US. Our failure to properly handle Germany and Japan earlier in the 20th century cost us and the world dearly. We must not make this same mistake with China.

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

Is the balance of power a fixed and unalterable standard? Or is it not a standard perpetually varying, as civilization advances, and as new nations spring up, and take their place among established political communities?

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…

The moment it became in the interests of one or the other of the Great Powers to alter the status quo, none of these treaty structures ever stood in the way of such alteration.

It looks like the so-called "winners" of the Cold War are determined to have it all, and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone.

When a rising power confronts a ruling power, bad things usually happen.... This is what happens when an extablished entity faces an upstart.... To avoid a disasterous clash like war, both parties have to make an adjustment, but the ruling power has to make more painful adjustments.

Politics abhors a vacuum, and Asian countries will gravitate towards China if U.S. influence is perceived as declining.

Most of the conversation about how geopolitics is changing in the 21st century focuses on the shift from west to east and on how we're moving from the bipolar power equation of the Cold War to a new bipolar relationship, that of the U.S. and China, that determines the mood music for everyone else.

When great powers fade, as they inevitably must, it's normally for one of two reasons. Some powers exhaust themselves through overreach abroad, underinvestment at home, or a mixture of the two. This was the case for the Soviet Union. Other powers lose their privileged position with the emergence of new, stronger powers.