G. John Ikenberry Quotes

The moment it became in the interests of one or the other of the Great Powers to alter the status quo, none of these treaty structures ever stood in the way of such alteration.

Great powers reserve the right to police bad actors in their neighborhoods.

The time has come to recognize that the U.S. will continue to exercise unprecedented power in a world where international rules are still unreliable and where security and advancing of the free democratic order still depend significantly on the possession and use of military might.

Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other.

The equality among all members of the League, which is provided in the statutes giving each state only one vote, cannot of course abolish the actual material inequality of the powers concerned.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

The American nation cannot reach across the planet and pick the leadership of other countries.

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.

No great power will allow itself to be strangulated.

What really matters for great powers is power—national economic and military strength—and that speaks loudly and clearly for itself.

The rules that organizations such as the United Nations rely on were not written by the majority of the world’s people, who have long seen powerful states declare exceptions for themselves. Newly powerful states will challenge this system --

The U. S. is not the Boss, not the Boss any longer.

Great powers can't get tired, because the international order is not self-governing.

I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chessboard of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain.

In a world in which the United States does less, whatever set of calculations, other countries will tend to calculate - to move in one of two ways. Either they will assuage or, to use a more loaded term, appease the strongest power in the neighborhood with all the consequences of that, or they will determine to take matters into their own hands.

The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.

Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.

The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests.

The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the U.N. is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them.

The U.S. must differentiate between controversial assertions of power, like those in the South China Sea, and fair reflections of China's growing contribution to the world, such as the new banks.

Since the end of the Cold War, hegemonism has become increasingly unpopular.

All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence.

Global conditions are far too complex to be able to imagine that they could ever be really controlled by one power.

If there is one great power, and the great power has taken upon itself the right to preempt and is choosing for itself when and in what circumstances it's going to do that, obviously it leads people in the rest of the world to wonder how far this doctrine extends.

I don't believe in ideology in international relations.