Thomas Friedman Quotes

No nation can control its own destiny. They are played off against each other in the global economy.

A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.

Stop viewing China like it's the Cold War. Start viewing them as a modern member of the industrialized world.

For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, aren't we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US?

The regime of globalization promotes an unfettered marketplace as the dynamic instrument organizing international relations.

The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.

In international relations, in foreign policy, a great deal has to do with historical circumstances, a great deal has to do with the sense and perception of people.

The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.

I've been to China and Russia, and I don't know anything about Chinese or Soviet relations.

One of the elements in the film that really fascinated me was not to look at the world in bi-polar terms of us vs them or east vs west, which was a by-product of the Cold War.

A lot of people think international relations is like a game of chess. But it's not a game of chess, where people sit quietly, thinking out their strategy, taking their time between moves. It's more like a game of billiards, with a bunch of balls clustered together.

Globalization is not a monolithic force but an evolving set of consequences - some good, some bad and some unintended. It is the new reality.

I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

Naturally enough, I couldn't have foreseen the vast sea change which has come upon that scene as a result of German reunification and associated events.

America won the Cold War by protecting our strategic resources from the threat of foreign control. We must bring the same attitude to our trade relationship with China.

Globalization is the process by which markets integrate worldwide.

We talk about globalization today as if it's some great big new thing, that we've all just discovered. But there's really nothing new about it.

Geo-economics may replace geo-politics as the driving force in international relations.

The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter…. And … there’s nothing you can do about the Middle East.

Globalization is very difficult to understand and almost impossible to regulate.

The Cold War is over. The world has become much more complicated.

What happens in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea has a greater impact on us than most events in Massachusetts.