“The Dynamo of force, accelerating beyond all governing principles, now organizes the world where faith once did, leaving us educated for a century of reason and deposited in one of pure momentum.”

“If peace is the object, then a blockade must be its instrument; but if a blockade is the instrument, then peace cannot be the object, for one cannot sow embargoes and reap concord.”

“Observed with the twenty-foot reflector of statecraft, this action's coordinates are logged, but the catalogue of its consequences remains, like the southern sky before my survey, dangerously incomplete.”

“You are told this show of force is for your safety, when reason plainly shows it is the surest way to purchase your peril.”

“The only thing worse than a failed negotiation is a successful blockade, for it proves that we have traded the tedious art of diplomacy for the vulgar spectacle of a tantrum.”

“Trace the isothermal line from that closed conference room to the steel in the strait, through the price of oil and the tremor in the bazaar, and you have mapped a single, destructive organism.”

“This hypothesis of coercion fails the test of consilience, for it cannot explain the phenomena it will generate in the stock exchange, the alliance structure, or the insurgent's recruitment pamphlet.”

“Such an act audits the national character and finds a deficit of patience, an overdraw on prudence, and a reckless willingness to mortgage our children's peace for our own pride.”

“Hateful things: the clatter of diplomacy being packed away, the dull grey of warships where trading vessels should be, and the long silence that follows a door slammed too hard.”

“Examining myself, I find I understand the man who, having failed to convince with words, reaches for the louder argument of force, though I cannot say this makes him right, only terribly human.”

“This is the raw arithmetic of power, where the frostbite of failed talks is treated by amputating the sea lane, a cure that kills the patient of global commerce.”

“To understand the asylum, you must become an inmate; to understand this blockade, ask not the admiral on the bridge but the engineer in the engine room and the baker in Tehran whose oven grows cold.”

“An experiment shows that lighting a fire in a powder magazine produces not light, but a great and final darkness, a result any practical man could have predicted without the trial.”