One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the dangers of romanticizing war, suggesting that it may diminish the effectiveness of deterrence.
Henry A. Kissinger's quote critiques the notion that making war seem appealing could erode its deterrent effect. He draws a comparison to historical contexts, arguing that the current situation is fundamentally different from past realities, such as the deterrence seen during Hitler's time, indicating that how society perceives war has significant implications for international relations and peace.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate on military strategy to emphasize the risks of glorifying war.
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.
An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law and not necessarily against it.
Seeking God? We have totally revised corporate worship services to be sensitive to "seekers." If worship were to be tailored for seekers, it would be directed exclusively to believers, for no one except believers ever seeks God (Rom. 3:9-12).
Harm no other beings. They are just your brothers and sisters.
The engineers of the future will be poets.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.
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