The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Interpretation
Mistakes in foreign policy occur when sound principles are applied in the wrong context.
Henry A. Kissinger highlights that the difficulties faced by American foreign policy during the 1960s and 1970s stemmed from a mismatch between the application of rational principles and the complex, often unsuitable political realities of the time. This suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach to foreign relations can lead to significant errors and unintended consequences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political science discussion to illustrate the pitfalls of foreign policy decisions.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that werenβt realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.
Wringing your hands about states' rights, forget it. They're gone. Basically, the federal government can do whatever it wants. Who's going to protect the states? My court? Ha - we're feds!
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
Pakistan's key leaders have succumbed to the assassin's bullet or bomb or the hangman's noose, and the country has seen four military coups since its birth in 1947. Yet the Pakistani polity has limped on.
Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.
Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.
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