"The scale on which events have shaped themselves [since 1895] has dwarfed the episodes of the Victorian Era. Its small wars between great nations, its earnest disputes about superficial issues, the high, keen intellectualism of its personages, the sober, frugal, narrow limitations of their action, belong to a vanished period. The smooth river with its eddies and ripples along which we then sailed, seems inconceivably remote from the cataract down which we have been hurled and the rapids in whose turbulence we are now struggling." --Winston Churchill, describing the passage from the last century, from the vantage point of 1938.
At the second debate of the 1996 presidential campaign in San Diego, the questions to the candidates came from the audience, a scientifically selected sample of undecided voters. Well into the debate, only one rather peripheral question had been asked about foreign policy, which led the frustrated moderator, Jim Lehrer, to plead for more on the subject. The questioner he then called on dutifully asked about U.S.-Japan trade policy differences. That was the end of any discussion on foreign policy in that debate, or, for that matter, in the campaign itself.
