What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Interpretation
Political leaders often make decisions that intelligence agencies then work to rationalize and validate.
This quote by Henry A. Kissinger highlights the intricate relationship between political leadership and intelligence services. It suggests that decisions made by leaders are often backed up by intelligence agencies that seek to legitimize or justify those decisions, regardless of their ethical implications. This underscores the potential for manipulation and the way in which intelligence can be shaped to fit the narrative of political agendas.
In practice
In a discussion on the role of intelligence in political decision-making during a seminar.
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.
If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries .
The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
By virtually every metric, the liberal international order has made the world healthier, wealthier, wiser, more secure and more tolerant than it has ever been.
Here we are the way politics ought to be in America; the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.
The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.
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