Sarah Paine
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
What is your least bad option?
That's usually what foreign policy is.
It's not what the great option is.
There are none of those.
It's what the least bad one is.
And it takes a lot of thought, and gutting the State Department will not get you there.
It's profoundly dangerous.
Resources, big resources.
Let's talk about Bismarck.
This is the difference between limited and unlimited objectives.
And these concepts, which I've tried to transmit in these lectures, I think are useful and you apply them to other things.
So an unlimited objective means the state in question is not going to exist at the end of the war.
And if it's really unlimited, and Hitler does the most unlimited variant, he's going to kill all the people.
It's Slavs.
He's going to literally butcher them all.
So that's one kind of war.
A limited war means you want maybe a hunk of territory, something less.
The opposing government's going to live.
So Bismarck runs three wars.
One is the Danish War.