Joseph Nye Quotes

Effective foreign policymaking requires an understanding of not only international and transnational systems, but also the intricacies of domestic politics in multiple countries. It also demands recognition of just how little is known about “building nations,” particularly after revolutions – a process that should be viewed in terms of decades, not years.

I have found in my experience in government that I could ignore neither the age-old nor the brand-new dimensions of world politics.

The bipolar world is over, but it not going to be replaced by a unipolar world empire that the United States controls alone. The world is already economically multipolar, and there will be a diffusion of power as the information revolution progresses, interdependence increases, and transnational actors become more important. The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that.

If Thucydides were plopped down in the Middle East or East Asia, he would probably recognize ... the situation quite quickly.

Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone.

Any sense of global community is weak.

The international system consists not only of states. The international political system is the pattern of relationships among the states.

Anarchy means without government, but it does not necessarily mean chaos or total disorder.

Some say precipitating events are like buses - they come along every ten minutes.

Some economists believe that the Great Depression of the 1930s was aggravated by bad monetary policy and lack of American leadership. Britain was too weak to maintain an open international economy, and the United States was not living up to its new responsibilities.

The cure to misunderstanding history is to read more, not less.

The world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a strange cocktail of continuity and change. Some aspects of international politics have not changed since Thucydides. There is a certain logic of hostility, a dilemma about security that goes with interstate politics. Alliances, balance of power, and choices in in policy between war and compromise have remained similar over the millennia.

The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it.

Power conversion is the capacity to convert potential power, as measured by resources, to realized power, as measured by the changed behavior of others.

In foreign policy, as in medicine, leaders must “first do no harm.”