William Kirby Quotes

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

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

If America would withdraw from South Korea, there could be a power struggle between such as China and Japan.

I don't think that anyone seriously fears that the world can be blown to pieces all together. But what one can fear and rightly so are regional things, like in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, the Korean Peninsula, borders in Africa, etc.

A stable world may be one in which the United States can act to secure peace without fear of a nuclear attack.

The potential for regional conflict in the absence of an internationally active America is real.

Peace and security both in Europe and in the Pacific still depend on a balance of power.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive.

I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as it seemed obvious to me; and that, if once it became apparent that we were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from the abyss.

The United States has dealt with the Middle East and surrounding regions for many decades in the context of the Cold War.

I know that military alliances and armament have been the reliance for peace for centuries, but they do not produce peace; and when war comes, as it inevitably does under such conditions, these armaments and alliances but intensify and broaden the conflict.

When two giants meet with each other, when there is too little room for them on the world's surface, they try to measure their strength in order to decide by war the debatable question of hegemony.

Great powers engage.

Talking to the superpowers about disarmament is like talking to drug dealers about stopping drug deliveries.

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

We especially ought to pray that the powers of Europe be so poised and counterpoised among themselves that their own security may require the presence of all their forces at home leaving the other parts of the world in undisturbed tranquility.

Most people are disturbed by the shift from deterrence to preemption but the fact is that in international relations, deterrence has a poor track record

There is no need to fear Russia's actions, they are not aggressive... They are aimed at maintaining balance in the world order, and are extremely important for maintaining peace and security globally.

Obviously it is the intention of the American Government to conspire with Great Britain and other countries to obstruct Japan's efforts toward the establishment of peace through the creation of a New Order in Asia.

We refuse to fight another balance-of-power war.

An economic version of mutual deterrence is preserving the uneasy status quo between China and Japan.

If Russia and the United States approach each other in starkly adversarial terms, the conflict will badly warp the foreign policy of both countries ...

If this phrase of “the balance of power” is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting …

We can't just pop off and drop a bomb on North Korea and think everything's going to be OK. It just doesn't work like that. It's a complicated puzzle.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.