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.
They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.
No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals
Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor.
Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little. . . . We must strive for normalcy to reach stability.
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"
There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.
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