Richard Haass Quotes

Television was our chief tool in selling our policy.

Multi-lateralism's dilemma: that the inclusion of more actors increases the legitimacy of a process or organization at the same time as it decreases its efficiency and utility.

In foreign policy, managing a situation in a manner that fails to address core or what are sometimes described as final status issues can be preferable to attempting to bring about a solution sure to be unacceptable to one or more of the parties and that could as a result provoke a dangerous response. Economics,

It is too soon to say when or how this era will end or what will succeed it. But what is clear is that a good many of the trends are worrisome. If, for example, a Sino-American cold war materializes, it is quite possible this era may come to be known as the inter–Cold War era, one bookended by the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and one between the United States and China. Such an outcome would result in lower rates of economic growth for both because trade and investment would inevitably be curtailed. It would also reduce the potential for cooperation on regional and global issues. If the liberal world order is sustained and strengthened with the United States resuming a leading role, this could continue to be an era largely characterized by stability, prosperity, and freedom. It is possible, though, that the United States will choose to largely abandon its leading role in the world. In this case, we could in principle see an era of Chinese primacy, but given China’s character, internal constraints, and the nature and scale of the domestic challenges it faces, this is improbable. More likely is that this will turn out to be an era of deterioration, one in which no country or group of countries exercises effective global leadership. In that case, the future would be one of accelerating global disorder.

As we close out the second decade of the twenty-first century, we can draw some conclusions about the post–Cold War era. This has been a period in which new information and communication technologies have burst onto the world scene in forms that have made them widely available. There have also been great advances in development, including in medicine and life expectancy. Economic growth has been considerable and widespread. Wars between countries have become rare. But this has also been an era in which the advance of democracy has slowed or even reversed. Inequality has increased significantly. The number of civil wars has increased, as has the number of displaced persons and refugees. Terrorism has become a global threat. Climate change has advanced with dire implications for both the near and the distant futures. The world has stood by amid genocide and has shown itself unable to agree on rules for cyberspace and unable to prevent the reemergence of great-power rivalry. Those who maintain that things have never been better are biased by what they are focusing on and underestimate trends that could put existing progress at risk.

In Germany, the Depression was the final nail in the coffin of the Weimar Republic. Germany needed loans to pay its reparations, but once the Depression hit, its funding dried up and hyperinflation ensued as the government printed more money in a desperate effort to come up with the funds to repay what it owed. The collapse of the Weimar Republic was a textbook case of what happens when democracy and capitalism fail; angry, desperate people became willing to go along with a suspension of the most basic civil liberties in the hope that order and prosperity would be restored. Parties and politicians embracing fascism—a philosophy animated by extreme nationalism that called for government control of virtually all aspects of political and economic life—gained ground in Germany, Italy, Austria, and Japan. By 1932, the Nazi Party had become the largest party in the German parliament; a year later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. He quickly consolidated power, dismantled democratic protections, formalized harsh discrimination against Jews and others, and began rearming Germany. Hitler broke through the military constraints set by the Versailles Treaty. The absence of a French or British response taught Hitler the dangerous lesson that he could assert German rights as he saw them with little to fear.

At that point, both Dick Clarke from State and Richard Haass from the White House looked up from their note taking, staring across the table at each other in shock. Both of them students of military history, they knew what it meant when an army went silent.

nuclear weapons can offer protection against foreign intervention—and the lack of them can increase the odds of a country being attacked and its government ousted.

no country, much less a major power, is prepared to forgo the opportunity to act on behalf of what it perceives as its national interest simply because it lacks a blessing from the United Nations.

It is best to deal with issues and arguments on their merits, not on motives you might ascribe to those making the arguments.

Martin Luther King Jr. made such an argument in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

An informed citizen is someone who understands the fundamentals as to how the government and the economy and society operate, the principal challenges facing the country at home and abroad, and the contending options or policies for dealing with those challenges.

As gas is to an engine, think of obligations as the best fuel for a democracy, increasing the odds that it functions in a manner that serves its citizens well.

Max Arzt: “It is not enough to talk about human rights without emphasizing human duties. . . . Rights without duties lead to lawlessness, even as duties without rights can lead to slavery and to the abasement of individuality.

As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

It is ironic, and frustrating, that so many laud bipartisanship but seem to overlook that it requires compromise if it is to produce results.

There are three alternatives to real leadership. One is drift, which is pretty much what this country has experienced for the past decade. Business as usual, though, would likely bring about the second alternative: crisis. It could come in many forms, including an economic disaster imposed by a world that tires of lending dollars to the United States. A third alternative—faux leadership in the form of populism that would deepen social divisions without fixing problems—would be the worst of all outcomes.

Doubts have long existed. None other than John Adams, the second president of the United States and the father of the sixth, wrote that “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.

What makes the United States especially vulnerable to division is that the American nation, unlike that of many countries, is not based on ethnicity, race, heritage, language, or religion. The United States, which originally derived mostly from those with a European background—Native Americans were already here and enslaved persons were brought here involuntarily from Africa and the Caribbean—is truly diverse given subsequent waves of immigration from all over the world. The contrast with many mostly homogenous (in demographic terms) democracies in Asia (such as Japan and South Korea), Europe, and parts of Latin America is pronounced

The United States is particularly vulnerable to this failure to educate its citizens as to their heritage, as this is a country grounded not on a single religion or race or ethnicity (as are so many other countries) but on a set of ideas. These ideas are rooted in our history. Delineated in the Declaration of Independence, the new country made its case for breaking free from British rule as a necessary means to realizing the end of creating a society in which all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For its part, the government of the newly independent country would derive its mandate from the consent of the governed.

There are obviously major problems both with these words (the Declaration speaks of men, not people) and with the disconnect between the words and the American reality at the time, above all slavery, limits on rights for women, the treatment of the Indigenous peoples who were living here when the colonists arrived, and subsequent discrimination against multiple waves of immigrants. Nevertheless, the ideas represented a major step forward when they were articulated and remain relevant today. The notion that a person’s fate is not determined by circumstances of birth over which he or she had no control is radical, as is the idea that government derives its legitimacy from those it governs, not from a hereditary family or a self-appointed few.

happen more than anything else is an abundance of character, what in earlier times was known as virtue. James Madison, a founding father and the country’s fourth president, was explicit on its centrality to the democratic project: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Under Article V of the Constitution, an amendment requires a two-thirds majority vote by both the Senate and the House of Representatives and then must be approved by a majority vote of three-fourths of the states. The procedural requirements are daunting. There is in principle an alternative path for considering amendments to the Constitution—a new constitutional convention, convened by a majority vote by two-thirds (thirty-four of fifty) of state legislatures—but this too is a high bar and has yet to happen in practice.

Government service thus promises multiple payoffs. It would help to challenge the inaccurate and counterproductive perception that government is remote and unresponsive or, worse yet, an occupied foreign power. It is thus fully consistent with the obligation to get involved. The experience might just encourage some of our most talented young people to serve in the government or even to make it their career. If so, we would all benefit.

Go visit any of the presidential libraries or the National Archives. Watch or better yet sit in on a committee hearing of Congress or your state legislature. Go to the local school board meeting. Attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Walk a Civil War battlefield. Do not skip out on serving on a jury. You will come away with a new appreciation of how we got to where we are and why what is best about this country is worth preserving.

Similarly, a country at war with itself cannot set an example that people elsewhere will want to emulate. If democracy fails here, democracy will be endangered everywhere.

A democracy that concerns itself only with protecting and advancing individual rights will find itself in jeopardy, as rights will come into conflict with one another. When they inevitably do, it is essential that there is a path for citizens to compromise or a willingness to coexist peacefully and work with those with whom they disagree. Beyond rights, obligations are the other cornerstone of a successful democracy—obligations between individual citizens as well as between citizens and their government. Obligations—akin to what Danielle Allen calls “habits of citizenship”—are things that should happen but that the law cannot require.

Implicit in all this is the conviction that American democracy is most decidedly worth keeping. The American experiment has with one obvious exception managed to sort out its differences without experiencing civil conflict on a large scale. This worthy experiment has been a sanctuary for tens of millions of immigrants fleeing persecution or seeking opportunity, and a safe harbor for political expression and religious freedom. Our nation is also an engine of innovation, creating unprecedented wealth for hundreds of millions of people and increasing average life expectancy by decades for its citizens. Beyond its borders, the United States proved central to defeating fascism in World War II, navigating a Cold War that ended peacefully and on terms largely consistent with American interests and values, and fashioning a world order that for all its flaws ended the colonial era and built international arrangements that have brought greater prosperity, freedom, and health to literally billions of people.

But progress—slow and winding—has been made over the decades toward America fulfilling its promise. The hard-fought passage of the Thirteenth through Fifteenth, as well as the Nineteenth, Amendments to the Constitution, civil rights legislation, the legalization of same-sex marriage—all demonstrate that this country has an ability to recognize and correct mistakes and introduce political reform and policy change. This is another built-in advantage of democracies. Certainly more must be done, but as Winston Churchill put it, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.

The problem with direct democracy is that most citizens lack the time, interest, or expertise to run their societies.

As a result, trust—essential if people in a society are to work together constructively—is in short supply. An added benefit of more widespread national service is that it would also expose young people to government, breaking down the perception of government as alien from the people.

small part gave rise to this book is that we are failing to fulfill the obligation to pass down the essentials of what it means to be an American and citizen of the United States of America. Ironically, this does not apply to the newest citizens, immigrants. They often understand this country and its worth as much or more than anyone. After all, they chose to come here. They studied to pass the exam required for citizenship. They often escaped a country where economic opportunities were limited, where they did not have the freedom to speak

Putting democracy and the country founded on it first is the only way to preserve and, better yet, improve a United States of America that for any and all of its shortcomings and flaws is still the most successful political experiment in human history and the one with the greatest potential. As he did so often, Abraham Lincoln said it best: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

Some two centuries later, the forty-third president of the United States, George W. Bush, made a similar point. “The public interest depends on private character, on integrity and tolerance toward others and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.

would suggest you read and reread his Gettysburg Address. It is the best example I know of that less is often more.

When it comes to the latter, you would be hard-pressed to go wrong if the author’s name happens to be Beschloss, Caro, Kearns Goodwin, McCullough, Meacham, Logevall, Reeves, or Schlesinger.

My own list includes Allen Drury, Advise and Consent; Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men; Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird; George Orwell, 1984; Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.; Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here. I am also a big fan of the books and short stories of Ward Just. My son came of age watching The West Wing, and I loved both the riotously funny if cynical book and British TV series Yes, Minister. And, even if it is not a substitute for reading The Federalist Papers, you would be hard pressed to spend a more enjoyable evening than watching the musical Hamilton.

Moreover, the American system was designed for a population of just over three million, approximately 1 percent of the current total of more than 330 million. It was also built for a country of thirteen states concentrated on the eastern seaboard of the North American continent. Today’s United States numbers fifty states and spans a three-thousand-mile-wide continent and well beyond. It cannot be taken for granted that a system of government can evolve sufficiently to take into account changes of this scale. In this case, it has not; if anything, the American political process has grown more sclerotic and more resistant to making things happen.

Or think about it this way: twenty-two states with a combined population that approximates California’s have forty-four of the seats in the Senate. The Founders believed that such a system would help prevent a tyranny of the majority, but in fact the country has ended up with something closer to a tyranny of the minority: while most Americans support gun control measures and a woman’s right to choose, a minority has ensured there are few limits on the former and in some states have curtailed access to abortions. Today, a small number of states with a small percentage of the total population have an outsized influence on presidential elections, and as a result there is a growing gap between the popular vote and electoral outcomes.

Take smoking. In principle we should all have the right to smoke if we want to, despite the overwhelming evidence that smoking can kill the smoker. Judged from the standard set by Mill, smoking appears to be acceptable, something dangerous but not worthy of government restrictions except in the case of minors, since they are presumably not yet in a position to make responsible choices for themselves. But the calculation quickly gets more complex. When smokers become ill, this is a burden on the health-care system and the society more generally, as it leads to early exit from the work force. So we all indirectly subsidize those who smoke by paying higher health-care premiums or disability payments or by not benefitting from what they might contribute to the economy and to the government via taxes. It is not at all clear, though, whether such harm would be sufficiently great to justify government intervention.

Most relevant is that smoking poses a direct health threat to others. Those who breathe in secondhand smoke can become ill even if they themselves are not smoking. This is what led to limits or bans of smoking in public places and shared spaces, from bars and restaurants to trains, buses, planes, and offices. Quite simply, my right to health, to clean air, and to not breathe in your smoke outweighs your right to smoke. Again, returning to Mill, smoking is fair game for government intervention and regulation, as it can harm others.

In the course of writing this book, I did something I had never done before that I now recommend to you: go back and read speeches by the presidents, above all their inaugural and farewell addresses. They are readily available on the Internet. Not all are memorable, much less poetic, but a few are one or the other or both, and every one is valuable as a window on the moment it was delivered.

As Ronald Reagan noted in his autobiography, “If you got 75 or 80 percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that’s what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.” Reagan also reflected, “They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once.

What makes this noteworthy is that the gap between the legal philosophies of the liberal Ginsburg and the conservative Scalia was so considerable. They disagreed frequently and fiercely, but were open about learning from one another. Ginsburg was quoted saying Scalia’s dissents forced her to rewrite and, in the process, strengthen the rationale for her decisions; Scalia, for his part, when asked how he could be such good friends with someone he so often disagreed with, replied, “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people.” Their relationship was a model we would all do well to emulate.

To be clear, the overwhelming percentage of those who work in the federal branch are civil servants. A president gets to appoint on the order of four thousand people to senior positions. Whether someone is a political appointee or a civil servant, there are limits to how we can compensate those in government; there is no way this compensation can compete with Wall Street or Fortune 500 companies. What we can do is offer these people our respect.

Incentivizing government service, though, would be altogether different. Why should we want young Americans to perform one or two years of government service? One reason is that a common experience would help break down some of the barriers that have arisen owing to geography, class, race, religion, education, language, and more. World War II did precisely this for millions of Americans. Today, however, there is simply too little common experience in this society and too much that reinforces differences and divisions. It is revealing that according to a recent poll, almost half of second-year college students report they wouldn’t choose to room with someone who supported a different presidential candidate than they did in 2020, while a majority say they wouldn’t go on a date with someone who voted differently and nearly two-thirds couldn’t envision marrying someone who supported a different candidate.

would then suggest delving into history. There are far too many excellent books on the various phases of American history to mention, but some that I have found most memorable over the years include James McPherson on the Civil War (Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era), Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform as well as his The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, and Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. Books that take a larger sweep of this country’s past include Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, and, most recently, the volume by Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States.

have assembled a partial list: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow; Tina Cassidy, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait?: Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; and Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. I would also recommend reading writings by or about some of the pivotal figures in the fight for political equality, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Here I would mention Samuel P. Huntington’s American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan, and almost any book by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (in particular his The Cycles of American History). I would also recommend Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution; Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics; Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture; and the personal book by Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education.

I am reminded of the quote often attributed to the great twentieth-century British economist John Maynard Keynes, who when challenged on just this, is said to have quipped, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Changing one’s mind can be a sign of strength and wisdom, especially if new facts emerge or if what were thought to be facts are shown to be otherwise.

A related idea is simply to spend some time over coffee or a meal with someone you know who holds very different political positions. The goal is not to persuade them to come over to yours but to come away with a better appreciation of one another’s views and to build a foundation of respect and trust that allows both of you to spend time with one another despite your disagreements.

There are some challenges, however, that are uniquely American. It is difficult to reform the American system; apart from the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights, there have been only seventeen amendments to the Constitution since its adoption and none for the past thirty years.

Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote, in the latter’s case by nearly three million votes, but were still elected president. Given the realities of the electoral college, candidates all but ignore states where they are sure to win or lose and concentrate their efforts on the handful of states that could tip the balance.

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized; George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; Evan Osnos’s Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury; Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure; Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die; Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart; and Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. I also suggest you read the January/February 2022 issue of the Atlantic. For contrast, and decidedly more upbeat, is Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The public hearings held by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol should be required viewing and are readily available online.

More generally, local newspapers can also be valuable when it comes to state and local politics. Ideally your local paper makes use of reputable news services such as the Associated Press or Reuters to supplement what they themselves can do.

Yalta proved to be a textbook case of the propensity of American presidents to believe that on the strength of their personal relationship with a foreign leader a resolution to intractable problems could be reached, even if that leader was dictatorial and showed an unwavering devotion to what he judged to be his own national interests.

U.S. influence was limited by the commitment of the target country to pursue its nuclear-related goals and, partly as a result, to resist U.S. pressures. U.S. influence was also undercut by the actions of other governments that did not share U.S. preferences or priorities.

As became all too clear, an era that began brightly and optimistically with the end of the Cold War did not stay that way for long. And today, some twenty-five years later, it would be difficult to argue that the world is orderly or headed in that direction. To the contrary, there are real reasons for concern about the world and its trajectory even though the principal source of disorder over the centuries—major-power conflict—has been absent from the world scene.

Technological innovations and uneven rates of absorbing them matter, as do demographics, leadership, culture, policies, and fortune. The result of these and other factors was a first half of the twentieth century that was unprecedented in its disorder, and a second half characterized by considerable order, however different in its origins and however unexpected.

The driving force in many cases around the world was less a push for self-determination and the creation of a new state than it was some version of score settling or a winner-take-all effort to establish a new political, social, and economic hierarchy.

Widespread is the belief that the United States stands in the way of China’s emergence as a regional and global power of the first rank.

The motive that most captured the imaginations of the upper reaches of the George W. Bush administration, though, was the belief that a post-Saddam Iraq would become democratic, setting an example and a precedent that the other Arab states and Iran would have great difficulty resisting. The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad.

One has to assume that as often as not individuals of mediocre or poor skills will enter into positions of responsibility.

the ability of the United States to translate its clear advantages in wealth and military power into influence was limited at the global and local levels alike.

Much of history is the result of friction leading to conflict between existing and rising powers, reflecting the difficulty in peacefully accommodating the changing power balance and relationship between the two.

But the cold reality is that no such broad and deep consensus exists as to what is to be done, who is to do it, and how to decide. There is a substantial gap between what is desirable when it comes to meeting the challenges of globalization and what has proven possible.

History is filled with examples of individuals and countries acting against their own self-interest.

no progress was made on the tension arising from the U.S. dollar’s status as both the national currency of the United States and the global reserve currency, that is, the currency used for most international transactions, which required most countries to keep a store of it on hand. The U.S. Federal Reserve thus acted as both the country’s and the world’s central bank; the problem in the eyes of many resulted from the fact that the world had no oversight or control over the U.S. central bank or U.S. economic policy more broadly.

Syria in particular emerged as an example of what could go wrong: hundreds of thousands of Syrians had lost their lives and more than half the population had become internally displaced or refugees, in the process threatening to overwhelm not just Syria’s neighbors but Europe as well.

Populism and extremism gained ground in mature democracies and authoritarianism in other countries. The result was the opposite of a virtuous cycle: challenges stemming from globalization contributed to many of these domestic developments, while these same developments made it more difficult for governments to deal effectively with global challenges.

A cardinal reality associated with globalization is that little stays local in terms of its consequences.

The fact that as of this writing a significant percentage of the population refuses to accept the results of the November 2020 election, and a meaningful number of those with leadership roles in the Republican Party are encouraging them not to, is evidence that something is seriously amiss.

The initial step to realize this idea was to create the European Coal and Steel Community, consisting of France, West Germany, and Italy, as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (often referred to as the Benelux countries). This pact fully integrated the coal and steel industries of these countries so as to make their economies mutually dependent. This marked the beginning of the European project, one that over the following decades would evolve into the European Community (EC) and later still the European Union, which over time came to broaden its membership and enhance the authority of its institutions of collective governance to extend to economic and foreign policy.

there were ample opportunities to prevent what became World War II. The United States deserves a share of the responsibility. The Senate’s rejection of the new League of Nations presaged a retreat into isolationism, which gained traction in America during the two decades between the two world wars. Making matters worse was a simultaneous embrace of protectionism that weakened economies and democracies around the world along with a decline in U.S. military readiness. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. president from 1933 to nearly the end of World War II in 1945, encountered political resistance when he attempted to provide help to the Allies facing Germany, because a good many Americans feared doing so would get the United States dragged into European fighting. (The isolationist movement went by the name of America First. One of its principal representatives was Charles Lindbergh, whose solo flight across the Atlantic had made him a public hero.) The opposition to Roosevelt signaled to German and Japanese leaders that they could invade others with a degree of impunity.

Hard choices need to be made. Americans must distinguish between the desirable and the vital; the feasible and the impossible.

The objective is for the US to be more selective in what it does overseas and to focus more resources and attention on what it is doing at home.

The goal is to increase the number of Americans who can hold their own in an increasingly competitive world and ensure sufficient resources are available so the US can do what it wants and needs at home and abroad.

Nations have no permanent friends nor permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

The US must realize that Western-style democracy may not be universal in its appeal or reach.

The world is looking for a signal the US has the political will and ability to make hard choices.

Are we capturing, killing, deterring, and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?

How do you dissuade young men and women from becoming terrorists? How do you reverse the recruitment and retention of terrorists? You must change what is being preached in the mosques, taught in schools, read online, and discussed at home.

Can we expect China to use their increased diplomatic, economic, military, and information strength to help resolve regional conflicts?

The world economy increased fivefold between 1950 and 1990. Trade volume grew even more rapidly, from approximately $125 billion in 1950 to $7 trillion forty years later. As for development, the number of people on the earth living in extreme poverty (about 1.3 billion) stayed roughly constant over those years even though global population doubled, from 2.5 billion to more than 5 billion.10

although it is one of the tragic ironies of history that the end of the colonial era, rather than promoting order, in many instances created disorder on a large scale.

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