Success Quote by Fareed Zakaria

Diplomacy, Zakaria suggests, is a brutal accounting exercise: the real price isn’t paid when you posture, it’s paid when your words actually touch reality. By borrowing Schelling, he smuggles a cold strategic insight into a sentence that reads like plainspoken common sense. Promises are “expensive when they succeed” because success triggers obligation. A security guarantee, a red line, a trade pledge - once it works, you’re on the hook to keep paying the premium: money, credibility, troop deployments, domestic political capital. Success turns rhetoric into a mortgage.

Threats are “expensive when they fail” because failure forces a humiliating choice: escalate (and maybe stumble into a war you didn’t want) or back down (and teach everyone that your warnings are theater). Either option drains the currency of credibility that great powers spend to avoid constant proving contests. The subtext is cynical but accurate: leaders often prefer ambiguity not because they’re weak, but because clarity is costly. Vagueness is a discount strategy.

Contextually, this is Schelling’s world of deterrence and bargaining - the idea that coercion works through expectations, not just capabilities. Zakaria is writing for an era obsessed with “strength,” where pundit culture treats commitments and ultimatums as evidence of seriousness. He flips that macho framing. The intent is to warn policymakers and audiences against the cheap thrill of declarative foreign policy: the tweetable promise, the performative threat. The line lands because it punctures moralized talk about resolve with an economist’s punchline: you don’t pay for words when you say them; you pay when you’re forced to honor them.