Kishore Mahbubani Quotes

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

America has saved the world most of the time, but messed it up a couple of times.

Americans tend to see U.S. primacy as beneficial to both their country and the rest of the world.

America is different. It irks and domineers. But it does not conquer. It tries to call the shots and bend the rules, but it does not go to war for land and glory.

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

It’s not a dictatorship in the United States. But it is dictatorial to the rest of the world. Who’s going to say no?

We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort.

There is a reason the world always looks to America.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so.

American influence is not what it used to be.

Those who say that America has to dominate the world, and that you either have to control everything or go home, don't understand the way power is projected.

It is a myth that most people throughout the world hate America. They hate the American government and the American military …. They love American culture—they have made it the world’s culture.

Never before has the gap between American power and its legitimacy been so great.

We were quite naïve about the use of American power.

The biggest thieves in the world are the Americans and the biggest terrorists on earth are the Americans.

We speak of the United States as a “benign hegemony”.

We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.'

My priority is to give the United States the kind of influence it should have.

While The United States is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, it is also the most detested nation that the world has ever known.

American power worldwide is at its historic zenith.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

But, actually, it is only Americans who say that our freedoms and prosperity are the reason foreigners hate us. If you ask the foreigners, they make it clear that it's America's bullying foreign policy they detest.

The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.

For me, America is really, truly the indispensable nation.