Time & Perspective Quote by Abdelaziz Bouteflika

Power, Bouteflika warns, has outgrown its old fantasies. The line pivots on a hard-earned modern truth: military might can still topple regimes or crush movements, but the total erasure of a society has become a boomerang act, ricocheting into global instability. It’s a statement shaped by the late-20th-century afterimage of decolonization and the Cold War, when “material force” was often sold as a clean instrument of order, and by the post-1990s reality in which intervention, sanctions, and “regime change” reliably spill across borders.

His intent is diplomatic and defensive: to argue for limits on coercion in international politics and to elevate sovereignty as not just a moral claim but a pragmatic one. The syntax does rhetorical work. “Yet” signals a rebuttal to the standard great-power premise that security can be engineered through dominance. “Some ideologies” concedes what force can do - break parties, prisons full of dissidents, silence factions - while “no longer obliterate a civilization” raises the stakes to the level of collective life: institutions, identity, infrastructure, memory.

The subtext is aimed at powers tempted to treat smaller states as expendable theaters. Bouteflika implies that in an interdependent world - nuclear risk, energy markets, migration flows, terrorism, environmental blowback - annihilation is not local. The planet becomes the collateral. Coming from an Algerian statesman, it also carries a postcolonial edge: a refusal to let “order” be defined by those with the biggest weapons, and a reminder that the cost of breaking a society rarely stays with the breaker.