James Traub Quotes

The chief threats to security come from failed states.

Failed states are mainly a threat to their own inhabitants. We should help them anyway.

The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as 'failed states.'

The state is in danger of falling into disrepute due to the evidence of its inadequate resources.

In Kenya, crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of successive Kenyan governments to control either.

Endemic, indigenous corruption has been present in every failed state …. It inevitably causes poverty.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

Failed states have become breeding grounds for conflict.

Corruption could lead to the collapse of the Party [Communist Party of China] and the downfall of the State.

… most republics through history have eventually collapsed, degenerated into tyranny, or were overthrown.

Egypt has a population of 90 million. If this country fails, the whole region will slide into a cycle of anarchy that will represent a grave danger to all countries in this region, including Israel, and would extend to Europe.

Distance is collapsing in our world. People all over the world are having difficulty imagining their future, and their governments just tell them about the virtues of the past.

States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.

Egypt is going to be, potentially, a failed state if we don't help them.

We tend to look at countries in terms of failed states and functioning states, which is rather simplistic.

The United States learned a big lesson. Its greatest danger in the world came not from large nations but from failed states.

If there is a constant to the American campaign story, it is that elites can’t predict the future very well. News is what surprises us, which is why the political press always has news. Voters are always undoing our certainties.

One should be very careful indeed about using such loaded terms as ‘frustration,’ ‘anger,’ and especially ‘resentment’ to explain populism. One should at least face up to the political consequences of such psychologizing diagnoses — namely, that they end up confirming those people’s view of ‘liberal elites’ as being not just deeply condescending but also constitutively unable to live up to their own democratic ideals by failing to take ordinary people at their word.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

Large-scale corruption persists, with Afghanistan third from the bottom in international rankings, ahead of only Somalia and North Korea. Adjusted for inflation, American spending to reconstruct Afghanistan now exceeds the total expended to rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan; yet to have any hope of surviving, the Afghan government will for the foreseeable future remain almost completely dependent on outside support.

The recent uprising, while leveled agaisnt the bicostal elites, is not a protest in the name of a faction of America, but in the name of American sovgeignty itself.

Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification—denying real class differences wherever possible.

Libya is a failed state and becoming a launching pad for external operations, as is Sinai in Egypt.

They have acted like carnivores who used the world to enrich only themselves, and whether it's the election of Donald Trump, or Brexit, the elites have realized that the people have stopped listening to them, that the people want to determine their futures and, in a perfectly democratic framework, regain control of their destiny.