A peace deal requires agreements, and you don't make agreements with your friends, you make agreements with your enemies.
As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.
Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won't cooperate with each other- unless they are forced to do so by political level authority.
Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.
I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.
In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided.
Know something about something. Don't just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.
The controlled chaos is one way to get creativity. The intensity of it, the physical rush, the intimacy created the kind of dialogue that leads to synergy.
World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.
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