Success will require the studied lack of sophistication of a Ronald Reagan and the casual dishonesty of an FDR. The president must appear to be not very bright yet be able to lie convincingly.

The worst president is closer by nature to the best then either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.

In the course of the century, so many individual decisions are made that no single one of them is ever critical. Each decision is lost in the torrent of judgments that make up a century.

The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.

Their job as leader was not to solve the problem – the president really has little control over the economy – but to convince the public not only that he has a plan but that...

The great presidents never forget the principle of the republic and seek to preserve and enhance them – in the long run– without undermining the needs of the moment. Bad presidents simply do what is...

Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.

If the cost of naming the enemy is diplomatically or politically unacceptable, then the war is not likely to go well.

Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do...

Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.

Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.

Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.

Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.

Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.

While you and I are allowed the luxury of our pain, president isn’t. A president must take into account how his citizens feel and he must manage them and lead them, but he must not...

The idea that the president has the power to craft a new strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of reality crafted by those who came before him. We are all trapped in...

Presidents and other politicians manage the appearance of things, largely by manipulating the air and hope.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as...

The reality is that the American people have no desire for an empire. This is not to say that they don’t want the benefits, both economic and strategic. It simply means that they don’t want...

Secularism drew a radical distinction between public and private life, in which religion, in any traditional sense, was relegated to the private sphere with no hold over public life. There are many charms in secularism,...

Long-term solutions are more attractive and cause much less controversy than short-term solutions, which will affect people who are still alive and voting.

A century is about events. A decade is about people.

The threats that resurfaced in the past 10 years were not an aberration. Al Qaeda and terrorism or one such threat, but it was actually not the most serious threat that the United States faced....