Diplomatic Negotiations Quotes



This quotation is often misunderstood. At the time there were a number of siege machines that were used to batter or breach the walls of towns, forts or castles. However, really good architects (actually military engineers and architects were the same at the time) were able to design countermeasures to thwart the machines by analyzing the principles of the siege machines and creating counter machines, structures and tactics. This point was that the clever architects were necessary and able to save nations. Most of these have got unheralded at the time or in history except for a few like Leonardo Da Vinci who is today known as a great artist and futurist but was mainly known his his own time as a military engineer.


This concept of Total War turns out to be the only way to bring many conflicts to an end. Sherman was hated by generations of Southerners because he appeared to be vengeful to humble the Southern pride and spirit. But actually, Sherman was not personally vengeful at all and respected the South and understood its point of view more than most in the North. However, he was one of the first of the Western World’s military leaders to realize that with modern warfare and the then modern weapons, the only way to win a war was to persuade the enemy to stop fighting and if they refused, as the South kept doing, the only rational and humane course was to end the war as swiftly and totally as possible.


Some Americans and Europeans have urged Putin to solve the Chechen problem politically---to sit down and negotiate with the leaders. The Chechen terrorists have been particularly brutal killing hundreds of children at a time. Putin felt that it was easy for Americans and Europeans to tell him to negotiation with terrorist murders while they would never do so with the terrorists that had killed their people in their countries. Chechen is a province of Russia where fundamentalist Islamic terrorists mounted an armed, violent, terrorist insurrection and then spread their terrorism to other parts of Russia. Brussels was the political capital of Europe.