"Force, history teaches, summons counterforce. What goes around comes around. The United States is the only nation of the earth that has used these weapons of mass destruction. An American attempt to dominate world affairs is a recipe for provoking their use again, very possibly on American soil.
"It's unlikely that the passion for self-determination will be any easier to suppress than the spread of destructive technology. Empire, the supreme embodiment of force, is the antithesis of self-determination. It violates equity on a global scale. No lover of freedom can give it support. It is especially contrary to the founding principles of the United States, whose domestic institutions are incompatible with the maintenance of empire. Historically, imperial rule has rested on three kinds of supremacy — military, economic, and political. The United States enjoys unequivocal superiority in only one of these domains — the military, and here only in the conventional sphere. (Any attempt at regime change in a country equipped with even a modest deliverable nuclear arsenal is out of the question even for the United States.) American economic power is impressive, yet in this domain it has several equals or near equals, including the European Union and Japan, who are not likely to bend easily to American will. In the political arena, the United States is weak. ‘Covenants, without the sword, are but words,’ Hobbes said in the seventeenth century. Since then, the world has learned that swords without covenants are but empty bloodshed. In the political arena, the lesson of the world revolt — that winning military victories may sometimes be easy but building political institutions in foreign lands is hard, often impossible — still obtains. The nation so keenly interested in regime change has small interest in nation-building and less capacity to carry it out. The United States, indeed, is especially mistrusted, often hated, around the world. If it embarks on a plan of imperial supremacy, it will be hated still more. Can cruise missiles build nations? Does power still flow from the barrel of a gun — or from a Predator Drone? Can the world in the twenty-first century really be ruled from thirty-five thousand feet? Modern peoples have the will to resist and the means to do so. Imperialism without politics is a naïve imperialism. In our time, force can win a battle or two, but politics is destiny.”
