The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.

America is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire – different from Britain’s and Rome’s but an empire nonetheless.

Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and other minorities were generally safe within autocratic regimes such as Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey but were killed or oppressed when these autocracies began giving birth to independent states dominated by ethnic majorities, such as Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and Turkey.

The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them “from the landbound enemies of liberty.

As we seek perfection in our officials through an increasingly intense legal scrutiny, and reap an increasingly sallow form of mediocrity instead, there will come times – perhaps dangerous and violent times – when we will be more forgiving toward those who were supremely imperfect in their character yet unafraid to challenge the public mood.

Given the level of anti-Americanism in the world, given the level of frustration with the United States throughout the Muslim world, you’ve got a homegrown attack or you have a nuclear explosion in the air that is not a test somewhere. Those are still the biggest threats out there.

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes – slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.

Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline – for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still.