Sparks: Colombia votes in presidential election that could redefine relations with US

Until the name 'ally' describes a relationship of mutual respect rather than mere convenience, the ritual of state visits will produce only hollow ceremony, not true order.

Whether a foreign capital elects a friend or a foe lies entirely outside your control, but your judgment of that event remains your own to master.

The map of alliances is redrawn not in the palace but by the people who choose their own north star, and I have seen them walk through fire to reach it.

The prince who binds his state's fortune to the volatile temper of another courts disaster, for alliances built on personality founder when the man falls from power.

Hegemony is maintained not by the warship but by the textbook and the trade deal, manufacturing the consent that makes coercion unnecessary.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the corruption of a great power is measured by its treatment of the smaller ones.

As the humors of the body politic shift, the fever of public recrimination reveals an imbalance that no diplomatic poultice can cure.

A house divided against itself cannot stand, and neither can an alliance built upon the shifting sands of personal pique rather than enduring principle.

Those who preach patience and moderation to a people choosing their own destiny are the very ones who benefit from the old arrangement.

To understand an alliance, one must not interview the ambassadors but walk in the shoes of those whose lives are shaped by its terms.

Before tearing down the old fence of a long-standing alliance, one ought first to inquire why the builders saw fit to erect it.