T.R. Fehrenbach Books & Quotes

“The lesson of Korea is that it happened.”

“One reason some patterns are indistinct is that no one wants to see them. Some men always reject the historic logic of their times. The West was unable to see the historic logic in the rise of Hitlerian Germany and adventurist Japan... The dominant pattern was Western weakness in the face of challenge.”

War History Weakness Pattern The West

Author:T.R. Fehrenbach

“It seems likely the Russians never understood this inherent dichotomy in the American soul. They were genuinely irritated when the United States agreed to a world in which power ruled in 1944, then reneged and wanted some kind of parliamentary world democracy in 1945. This did seem double dealing, but it was hard for Russians to grasp the difficulties of the State Department, which, unlike the Soviet Foreign Office, could not wheel and deal with no regard to public consumption.”

War Power United States United Nations Russians

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“Almost all human societies or organisms are held together partly by outside pressures, or fear of a real or fancied danger.”

Society Danger Pressure

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“Because the American people have traditionally taken a warlike, but not military, attitude to battle, and because they have always coupled a certain belligerence - no American likes being pushed around - with a complete unwillingness to prepare for combat, the Korean War was difficult, perhaps the most difficult in their history.”

War Military Discipline Preparation

Author:T.R. Fehrenbach

“The American public, unaware of the looming geopolitical crisis, demanded that the boys come home, and since the public was armed with the ballot, the boys were going to come home.”

Democracy Crisis Clueless Public Sentiment

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“National sovereignty, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, had been considered as absolute in theory. When it was combined with national power, as the case of the USSR, it was absolute. National sovereignty buttressed by real national power could be bound or regulated only by two things: a sense of responsibility, or a fear of consequences.”

Consequences United Nations National Sovereignty Un National Power

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“The USSR felt safe only on a continent it controlled. The movement of Russian power or ideology westward from the Elbe or Danube could only bring the USSR into violent confrontation with the North Atlantic civilization. And the United States had twice taken to crusade to prevent the consolidation of Western Europe under single-power hegemony.”

Russia United Nations Nato Hegemony Crusade

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“Neither the Russians nor the Americans were the cleverest people, or the most experienced, in the world that followed 1945. The French were rather more civilized, the British more knowledgeable, and even the Italians at times more practical. But if you have the ships, the guns, and the money, too, cleverness or experience is not really necessary. Even a reasonable amount of blundering can be survived.”

United States Russia International Relations Cleverness Armed Blundering

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“Vyshinsky showed the new Soviet ploy: to obscure Russian expansion and Russian tyranny by direct and repeated reminders of former Western imperialism and the Pax Britannica, of which the West had grown ashamed.”

Politics Shame United Nations Tactics Hearts And Minds

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“Harry Truman, and the men around him, were learning the necessity of acting first and talking later. Harry Truman was learning there are times when peoples have to be saved whether they want such salvation or not.”

Truman Un International Politics

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“Modern man, especially modern urban intellectual man, without a sense of history or blood soil - the words Hitler's distortion made anathema - understood poorly the seemingly inexorable cycles of human conduct. Men such as Churchill, nonintellectual but brilliant, were not cleverer than the best minds of the West. But they tended to see what was, and not what should be.”

Reality History Warning Churchill

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“[Vandenberg] said: "I do not know why we must be the only silent partner in this Grand Alliance. There seems to be no fear of disunity, no hesitation in Moscow, when Moscow wants to assert unilateral war and peace aims which collide with ours. There seems to be no fear of disunity, no hesitation in London, when Mr. Churchill proceeds upon his unilateral way to make decisions often repugnant to our ideas and ideals.... "Honest candor compels us to reassert in high places our American faith in the Atlantic Charter. These basic pledges cannot now be dismissed as a mere nautical nimbus. They march with our armies. They sail with our fleets...they sleep with our martyred dead. The first requisite of honest candor...is to relight this torch. "I am not prepared to guarantee permanently the spoils of an unjust peace. It will not work. I am prepared by effective international cooperation to do our full part in charting happier and safer tomorrows.”

War Peace United States United Nations Candor Ww2 Principle

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“Having staved off disaster by force of arms, the West had somehow come to the idea that principle, rather than force, was a better basis for peace. The trouble was, publics took an "either/or" attitude toward the question: few stated that force without principle was sterile, but that principle without force behind it was powerless. The great trouble with classic liberal thought and classic liberals is that they have no trouble conceiving principle, but enormous trouble understanding how it must be implemented.”

Force Peace United Nations Principle Liberal Thought

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

“The vision of world government was, of course, a shining one. But what was tragic about all this was that nobody, not even liberal opinion, really wanted world government. What was wanted was a world without war.”

War Peace United Nations World Government

Book:This kind of peace

Source: This kind of peace

T.R. Fehrenbach Books

This kind of peace

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