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.
Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power -- power sufficient to interfere with property.
Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?"
By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.
The Senate has been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.
One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism has been by way of medicine....If you don't do this, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like in American when men were free.
Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
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