Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
Imperial overstretch has rarely occurred because a great power had too little military force; on the contrary, it was likely still to possess massive… - Paul Kennedy
" "Imperial overstretch has rarely occurred because a great power had too little military force; on the contrary, it was likely still to possess massive forces and at times to deploy them a long way from home. The real problem, it seems, has not been the force-projection capacities of the current number one, but a failure to recognise that long-term wealth and strength depend on the non-military dimensions of national power and on making hard political decisions on the home front.
English
Collect this quote
About Paul Kennedy
Paul Michael Kennedy CBE FBA (born 17 June 1945) is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and writes for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many foreign-language newspapers and magazines. His monthly column on current global issues is distributed worldwide by the Tribune Content Agency. He has published on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggles, emphasizing the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight.
Also Known As
Birth Name:
Paul Michael Kennedy
Alternative Names:
Paul M. Kennedy
•
Paul M Kennedy
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Paul Kennedy
The US possesses 12 such carriers (another, the USS Ronald Reagan, is to join the fleet soon), each with the attendant group of complementary warships. There are also smaller carriers designed, not for open-ocean combat against all, but to take powerful Marine Corps battalions ashore.
This array of force is staggering. Were it ever assembled en masse the result would be the largest concentration of naval and aerial force the world would have seen.
Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap, Britain's army was much smaller than European armies, and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies – right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy.
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
The emperors, kings, prime ministers and presidents of great powers have always preferred the heady world of diplomacy, war and international affairs to the unglamorous realm of fiscal reform, educational change and domestic renewal. That is understandable, since they will go down in history as leaders of this or that spectacular demonstration of the country's still-powerful military capacity. It is left to later generations to pay the price.
Loading...