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When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.

— Robert Kagan

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Notes from Wikiquote

According to Kagan, this is a variation of the proverb "When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails." (p. 25 of the same book)

Variants

version: If you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.

More quotes by Robert Kagan

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 force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States...

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.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Kagan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.