Battlegrounds Quotes

“Other factors depend on the Israeli people, including whether the highly personalized Israeli political landscape allows the sincere pursuit and eventual approval of an agreement. Progress also depends on the United States’ ability to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority or mediate between the two, an ability dependent on whether both sides view the United States as an honest broker.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World

“Many factors concerning the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians depend on the Palestinian people, such as whether an alternative to Hamas will develop in the Gaza Strip or if the Palestinian Authority will evolve in a way that produces not only a renewed desire to negotiate final status, but also the ability to enforce an agreement.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World

“Поки вони підривають школи для дівчаток в Афганістані, їхні діти ходять до приватних шкіл.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds

“Освіта життєво важлива не лише для того, щоб громадяни розпізнавали небезпеки російських дезінформаційних кампаній, а й щоб відновилася довіра до демократичних принципів, інституцій і процесів.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds

“partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.” I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them. The options we developed, if approved, would become integrated strategies. I insisted that these strategies must identify not only goals, but also our assumptions—especially assumptions concerning the degree of agency and control that we and our partners could expect in order to make progress toward those goals. The strategies needed to be logical with regard to the means employed and the desired ends. We would also work hard to describe what was at stake and to explain why accomplishing those ends was worth the risks and potential cost in treasure and, especially, blood. I then laid out what I saw, from my more than three decades in the military and from studying national security as a historian, as the four categories of challenges to national and international security. These would be our priorities as we developed integrated strategies for the president.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds

“Consistency and will are, therefore, important dimensions of strategic competence. But our will is diminished. As our foreign policies swung from over-optimism to resignation, identity politics interacted with new forms of populism. That interaction divided us and diminished confidence in our democratic principles, institutions, and processes.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds

“The over-optimism that energized U.S. foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration contributed to an underappreciation of the risks of action, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The pessimism about the efficacy of U.S. engagement abroad that influenced U.S. foreign policy under the Barack Obama administration led to an underappreciation of the risks of inaction, such as the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 or the decision to forgo military reprisals for the Assad regime’s mass murder of Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in 2013. Both forms of strategic narcissism were based mainly on wishful thinking and the definition of problems as one might like them to be as a way to avoid harsher realities.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds

“The president and many of those who served him were sympathetic to the New Left interpretation of foreign affairs, one that considers so-called Western capitalist imperialism as the primary cause of the world’s problems. “We have history,” President Obama said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.” An underlying premise of the New Left interpretation of history is that an overly powerful America is more often a source of, rather than part of the solution to, the world’s problems.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds

“education combined with the restoration of civility in public discourse can reduce the vitriol that widens the fissures in society that Russia and others exploit.”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. —SAUL BELLOW”
― H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds