Interviewer: Often great powers have the interest to keep conflicts alive, because in turmoil they can extract natural resources or sell weapons…

Luttwak interrupts: That is really a horrible fantasy, the reason great powers do what they do, the reason why human history is a history of crimes and follies, is because people get ideas. When somebody goes somewhere to steal something, there is a logic to it. But the United States has never taken one barrel of oil from Iraq, not one barrel! A, and B, they have not sold any weapons, so the Americans have never sold one weapon in Iraq, not one, and then never taken a barrel of oil. I wish they had. Unfortunately it’s much worse, there’s something much worse than stealing, and it is to have stupid ideas.

He also wrote about Putin recently:

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is guilty of a very great crime: He defends his allies and attacks his enemies, conduct particularly reprehensible in the eyes of the Obama Administration, which does the exact opposite.

…

Such primitive notions (of empire) are no doubt incomprehensible to Obama and his officials, as well as to their intellectual milieu, for which empire can only be an embarrassment, power cannot be purposeful, peace is obtained by good will and not by assured security, war is purposeless destruction (and all warriors are merely future PTSD cases), and diplomacy should be a multilateral pursuit, having to do with Global Warming if at all possible. These are all useful stances for rank-and-file Obama officials as they prepare their future with Bill and Melinda, Bill and Chelsea, and the rest of the PC foundation universe with its light lifting and ceaseless conferencing travel to yammy destinations, but to conduct the foreign policy of the United States they are hopelessly off-target. Putin and Netanyahu, by contrast, are determined to hit their targets hard.

Weirdly naive remark.