"Warrior Politics" by Robert D. Kaplan

• The spread of information in the coming decades will lead not just to new social compacts, but to new divisions as people discover new and complex issues over which to disagree.
• The battlefields of the future will be highly complex urban terrains. If our soldiers cannot fight and kill at close range, our status as a superpower is in question.
• The enormous size of our democratic institutions makes military planning and weapons procurement bot cumbersome and publicly accountable. Our future adversaries will be under no such restrictions.
• On a real battlefield, information about the enemy is always incomplete; by the time enough is known, it is too late to do anything.
• The greater the disregard of history, the greater the delusions regarding the future.
• In an imperfect world, Machiavelli says, good men bent on doing good must know how to be bad.
• A statesmen must be able to think the unthinkable.
• The United States cannot sustain its monopoly over new military technologies, many of which are not expensive and can be acquired by our adversaries through free trade.
• The power of the media is will full and dangerous because it dramatically affects Western policy while bearing no responsibility for the outcome.
• The emergence of some kind of loose world governance is probably inevitable -- barring a major war between two or more great powers such as the United States and China.