Quotations

Quote of the Day

by

While America has a legitimate concern in encouraging former Soviet states to develop into market democracies, there is no intrinsic economic or strategic American vital interest in Georgia per se and even less in South Ossetia. Georgia is our ally for only two reasons: Tblisi was enthusiastic to send troops to help in Iraq in return for military aid and it occupies a strategic location for oil and gas pipelines that will meet future European energy needs. In other words, Georgia’s role is of a primary strategic interest to the EU, not the United States. Which is why European and British companies have such a large shareholder stake in the BTC pipeline and why European FDI in Georgia exceeds ours. Yet it will be American troops in Georgia handing out bottled water and MREs, not the Bundeswehr or the French Foreign Legion. Something does not compute here.

Mark Safranski, a/k/a Zenpundit.

Mark has an excellent post on Pajamas Media entitled Let’s Not Rush into Cold War II, which the quote above comes from. RTWT.

See also a post on his site with additional comments and links.

And congratulations to Mark on the Pajamas Media gig. Nice.

Quote of the Day

by

The appropriate personification for Russia circa 2008 is not an oil-fueled Genghis Khan, threatening to surge once more across Eurasia … no, it is more like a drunk with a knife unable to admit they have terminal liver disease .. a vodka-fueled Genghis Khan’t if you will.
 
Surely a policy of political containment is really all that is needed while nature, rust and liver sclerosis on a Biblical scale do the rest.

Perry de Havilland

Quote of the Day

by

The slow, slow fading of the color line is one of the most important long-term trends in America’s self-understanding–the inexorable expansion of who gets to be part of the American folk community. Once, Irish Catholics, Italians, and Czechs couldn’t take part in the Jacksonian tradition. Now they’re the heart and soul of it. Hispanics are now headed in that direction.

Walter Russell Mead

RTWT

(Hat tip: James McCormick)

A relevant quote

by

This evening I was wandering roung the National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square, as it was open late (I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of which museums and art galleries keep late hours on which day of the week in London). Among other small exhibitions I found a selection of caricatures from Vanity Fair in the late nineteenth century.

There was a very fine picture by Baron Melchiorre Delfico, the man who created the Vanity Fair style in caricatures, of Baron de Reuter, founder of Reuter’s news agency, now known Thomson Reuters. The man clearly had a very impressive pair of mutton-chop whiskers. What was particularly interesting, however, is the comment that the editor had added in that long-ago issue of the magazine (December 14, 1872, since you ask).

As foreign news is now managed it is not too much to say that he who has the command of telegrams has the command of public opinion on foreign affairs.  

First telegrams, then telephones, satellite phones, even e-mails. That is how journalists have viewed their own position in the world for some time now. It is not easy to accept that the Vanity Fair editor’s comment no longer applies.