The force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States...
— Robert Kagan
Share this quote
Another quote →
More quotes by Robert Kagan
When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.
No one sitting in Germany in 1945 would have said, “Oh don’t worry, it’s just natural to become a democracy.”
In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.
The vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction.
The United States was losing interest in preserving European security, but at the same time it was hostile to European aspirations to take on the task themselves. Europeans complained about American perfidy, and Americans complained about European weakness and ingratitude.
All Robert Kagan quotes →