Great Power Politics Quotes

… realpolitik

The threat to Europe is for us to push Russia into China’s arms.

The centuries old Westphalian state system has never resolved the tension between the principle of the sovereign equality of states and the idea that great powers enjoy certain privileges and bear special responsibilities.

Entangling alliances have been considered worse than original sin since George Washington.

We have to get tough with the Russians. They don't know how to behave. They are like bulls in a china shop. They are only 25 years old. We are over 100 and the British are centuries older. We have got to teach them how to behave.

Why four great powers should fight over Serbia no fellow can understand.

Historically when there is a rising power like China, it has usually led to confrontations between the rising power and the existing dominant powers. And when you have a shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then you have an additional element.

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.

Like Prince von Bismarck in diplomacy, I have no secrets.

China will consider herself fortunate if she succeeds in keeping herself intact and is not dismembered or partitioned among the European powers that are colonizing the continent of Asia.

The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism: a complex interplay of nation-state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.

So, anything that avoids a conflict that could draw in, unhappily again, outside powers such as the United States or revisit, for example, Japan's interests in the Taiwan area would be the last thing that anyone would want.

Being a superpower is like being a Santa Claus that everyone hates.

America would never consent to become entangled in European diplomacy…

Like several hundred thousand fellow Karelians, we became refugees in our own country as great power politics caused the borders of Finland to be redrawn and left my home town as part of the Soviet Union.

In effect, I was asking that if Russia mobilized against Austria, the German Government, who had been supporting the Austrian demand on Serbia, should ask Austria to consider some modification of her demands, under the threat of Russian mobilization.

I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chessboard of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain.

I said to the German Ambassador that, as long as there was only a dispute between Austria and Serbia alone, I did not feel entitled to intervene; but that, directly it was a matter between Austria and Russia, it became a question of the peace of Europe, which concerned us all.

Cynics may say that Japan has been forced by the United States and England to give up her plan for dominating China, in the interest of a wider distribution of the spoils.

It seems incredible that the Russian Government should plunge Europe into war in order to make themselves the protectors of the Serbians.

Grand strategies are not nearly so important as grand strategists like to think, because countries tend to be judged by their actions, not on their words…. History shows that grand strategies do not alter the trajectory of great power politics all that much.