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Book: The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
Quotes of Book: The Return of Marco Polo's
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  1. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    despite the threats of Russian and Chinese expansionism, particularly in the Baltic, Black, and South China seas, the more important underlying dynamic will be the crises of central control inside Russia and China themselves as their authoritarian systems degenerate
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  2. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.
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  3. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    The problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again! is that it ignores limits and the availability of resources. World War II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left of European Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and Asian balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States-something that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned.
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  4. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    The United States, like any nation-but especially because it is a great power-simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and accepted.
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  5. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    If the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?
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  6. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?
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  7. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.
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  8. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius's army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.
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  9. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    Related lessons: Don't go hunting ghosts, and don't get too deep into a situation where your civilizational advantage is of little help.
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  10. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    In the interest of thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy, policy makers need to worry about how not to provoke more anarchy than the world has already seen.
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  11. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back more extreme elements. They are bold, but not crazy. The idea that more liberal regimes might replace them is an illusion.
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  12. Robert D. Kaplan _ The Return of Marco Polo's

    both Russia and China are dictatorships, not democracies. Therefore, losing face for them would be much more catastrophic than it would be for an American president. Politically speaking, they may be unable to give up the fight. And so we, too, might have to fight on, until there is some form of a regime change, or a substantial reduction in Moscow's or Beijing's military capacity
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