Robert Kagan

"[W]ho will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice Department?"

"Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes power. That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships, the opposition is always weak and divided. Thats what makes dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of persecution."

"The formula for defeating Trump in November [2024] is simple enough: Unite the Democrats, and split the Republicans."

"Many people responded to my last essay [dated November 30, cited above] by insisting that a majority of Americans oppose Trump, and they are right. But the way our system works today, that popular majority is prevented from coalescing. Many blame the electoral college or the two-party prejudice built into our system, and they might well be right. But, folks, are we going to fix these problems before November? The question is how best to bring this majority together in a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Republicans to prevent a dictatorship this coming year. Afterward, we can look at reforming the system. First, the system has to survive."

"The United States was losing interest in preserving European security, but at the same time it was hostile to European aspirations to take on the task themselves. Europeans complained about American perfidy, and Americans complained about European weakness and ingratitude."

"And now, in the final irony, the fact that the US military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem", allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous."

"Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trumps core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected."

"When you dont have a hammer, you dont want anything to look like a nail."

"The force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States..."

"The vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction."

"Americans officials have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe really have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem on Iraq — by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action — than they have ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction."

"In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship."