Excerpt of the day

I know most people don't equate reading a book on IR theory with going to a rock concert, but you do sometimes come across a real gem. Like this, from Charles Lipson's book on democratic peace theory:

To celebrate [German] Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's fiftieth birthday in 1943, several aides game him a beautiful box, decorated with semiprecious stones. They had planned to fill it with copies of all the important treaties and agreements he had concluded. They finally chose to leave the box empty because the Nazis had trampled every agreement Ribbentrop had made. As one aide told Hitler at supper, "We were thrown into great embarassment...There were only a few treaties that we hadn't broken." Hitler's eyes filled with tears of laughter.

For some reason, picturing Hitler and his buddies yukking it up because of all the treaties he broke just makes me laugh.