"There is no greater American error than the belief that liberal institutions and the rule of law relieve a nation of the moral dilemma involved in the exercise of power. Power, like sex, may be concealed and outwardly ignored, and in our society it often is; but neither in one case nor in the other does this concealment save us from the destruction of our innocence or from the confrontation with the dilemmas these necessities imply. When the ambivalence of one's virtue is recognized, the total iniquity of one's opponent is also irreparably impaired.
The picture, then, which I hope I have presented is that of an international life in which not only is there nothing final in point of time, nothing not vulnerable to the law of change, but also nothing absolute in itself: a life in which there is no friendship without some element of antagonism; no enmity without some rudimentary community of interest; no benevolent intervention which is not also in part an injury; no act of recalcitrance, no seeming evil, from which - as Shakespeare put it - some "soul of goodness" may not be distilled..." George F. Kennan