Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the administration's failure in managing international relations effectively.
Henry A. Kissinger highlights the paradoxical situation of an administration that is equally at odds with both allies and adversaries, while also facing significant global upheaval. This situation reflects a notable decline in diplomatic relations and indicates a broader instability in the world order since World War II, emphasizing the complexities and challenges of modern governance.
In practice
In a political debate, one could use this quote to illustrate the failures of current foreign policy.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t 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.
Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.
Yet the basic fact remains: every regulation represents a restriction of liberty, every regulation has a cost. That is why, like marriage (in the Prayer Book's words), regulation should not "be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly"
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.