American Foreign Policy Quotes & Sayings

Well, human security is a concept that I am very committed to enshrining in American foreign policy. — Hillary Clinton

the Christian Science Monitor and the AP. I wrote to the photo desk of the New York Times several times, offering myself up as a stringer, and each time my e-mail went unanswered. I wrote directly to the New York Times correspondents based in India and asked if I could shoot anything for them. They told me they took their own pictures while on assignment. I would keep trying. I felt that if I could only shoot for the New York Times - to me, the newspaper that most influenced American foreign policy and that employed the world's best journalists - I would reach the pinnacle of my career. — Lynsey Addario

So what we have is an American foreign policy that is inextricably linked to domestic matters. It is very dangerous for a politician who desires nothing more than to stay in office to address the mindset that any change in policy is appeasement. And Americans will accept that for a certain amount of time. — Michael Scheuer

Never before has anyone figured out how to rent out American foreign policy, how to convert the position of secretary of state into a personal money machine. Hillary, with Bill's help, figured out not only how to shake down Russian oligarchs and Canadian billionaires by offering them control of America's uranium assets; she also figured out how to rob the island nation of Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. It's one thing to rip off the world's rich; it takes a special kind of chutzpah to steal from the poorest of the poor. — Dinesh D'Souza

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values. — Mohsin Hamid

Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States. — Michael Mandelbaum

I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy. — Henry A. Kissinger

Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy. — Neil Jordan

There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense. — Barney Frank

Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the
benevolent state is our protector and that without it wed be at the mercy of
monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does
more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the
world ... by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and
everywhere. — Sheldon Richman

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament. — Richard Hofstadter

Together, these advocates create a pro-Israeli case so compelling that the idea and reality of Israel has worked itself deep into American culture, politics and foreign policy. Many American Jews refuse to accept it, but the real debate between Israel's supporters and detractors in America is all but over. — Aaron David Miller

This administration, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton through their foreign policy, have betrayed the American people, because the weakness they've displayed has led to Putin's incursions in the Middle East and in eastern Europe, and has led - has led to significant problems in the Middle East as well, and the death and murder of lots of folks. — Chris Christie

How did we win the election in the year 2000? We talked about a humble foreign policy: No nation-building; don't police the world. That's conservative, it's Republican, it's pro-American - it follows the founding fathers. And, besides, it follows the Constitution. — Ron Paul

Maintaining the balance of power should be as fundamental to American foreign policy as the Bill of Rights is to domestic policy. — George Friedman

Well, Mr Obama inherited probably the biggest inventory of problems, certainly foreign policy problems, than any American president ever has. I think the entire inventory of problems that he inherited is probably as big overall as any president, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt and maybe, in some cases, worse. — Chuck Hagel

Supporters of this fundamental change in immigration policy say we need to import more well-educated talent if we're to stay competitive. But exactly whose competitiveness are we talking about? Not the competitiveness of, say, American-born computer engineers. Adjusted for inflation, their earnings haven't gone anywhere in years. That's in part because American companies have been sending so much of their high-tech work abroad. Bringing more foreign-born engineers here under an expanded H1-B visa program, or a point system for that matter, will just depress wages even further. — Ronald Reagan

Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck. — Richard Just

Here's a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost. — Satoshi Kanazawa

I am ... willing to make it clear that American foreign policy must uphold the sanctity of international treaties. That is the cornerstone on which all relations between nations must rest. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in Somalia, in which thirty American troops were killed. President Clinton issued a directive on UN military conditions. The operations would also have to be directly relevant to American interests. These conditions excluded American support for UN intervention to stop the genocide [in Rwanda]. — Jonathan Glover

Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He's pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the proposition that this too will be the American century. — John Podhoretz

Many Americans, and many more people around the world, have been outraged by what they see as President George W. Bush's radical reordering of American foreign policy. — Stephen Kinzer

Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa ... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere. — Harry Belafonte

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy. — Michael Johns

I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman. — Eugene Jarecki

Extensive violations of human rights (torture, forced reduction of living standards for much of the population, police-sponsored death squads, destruction of representative institutions or of independent unions, etc.) are directly correlated with US government support. The linkage is not accidental; rather it is systematic. The reason is obvious enough. Client fascism often improves the business climate for American corporations, quite generally the guiding factor in foreign policy. — Noam Chomsky

No foreign policy can be sustained in the United States of America without the informed consent of the American people. And informed means just that, successes and failure, a realistic assessment of where we are and what the president plans to do about it. — Joe Biden

About 2500 years ago Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, wrote, He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. These remarkable photos and the stories that accompany them should be on billboards from sea to shining sea, so the pain and suffering they represent might fall drop by drop upon the American psyche and against our will, by the awful grace of God, wisdom might come to these United States and her foreign policy. — Gioconda Belli

The reason I made women's issues central to American foreign policy, was not because I was a feminist, but because we know that societies are more stable if women are politically and economically empowered. — Madeleine Albright

For my generation the relationship with Europe was the central point of American foreign policy. Even during my time in government there was disagreement, sometimes very strong disagreement. But they were all like arguments within a family. I am not sure if the generation which doesn't have these experiences has the same view of things. — Henry A. Kissinger

I think that American presidents, that position in itself, as well as American foreign policy, it has terrorism in it. CIA agents going to overthrow certain governments - they're using terrorist tactics. They're not going in there like, 'Hey, you wanna have some cake?' — Lupe Fiasco

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions. — Henry A. Kissinger

American foreign policy must be more than the management of crisis. It must have a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace. — George W. Bush

At the same time, old confrontations have taken on frightening urgency, especially the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir and the violent stalemate in the Middle East. Progress on these and other global challenges requires us to develop a larger strategy for American foreign policy, rooted in a fundamental commitment to move the world from interdependence to an integrated global community committed to peace and prosperity, freedom and security. — William J. Clinton

The cause of the attack was not American foreign policy but an amoral disregard for human life.It is grotesque to suggest that a four-year-old girl, making her first and only flight in an aeroplane, should somehow bear responsibility for the actions of a government for whom she was never allowed the chance to grow up and vote either for or against. — Menzies Campbell

A country that cannot count its own illegal aliens - estimates range from 8-12 million - with a porous 2,000 mile border is not secure despite twelve carrier battle groups. We must accept that it is a cornerstone of Mexican foreign policy to export illegally each year a million of its own to the United States to avoid needed reform at home and to influence American domestic policy. — Victor Davis Hanson

...the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. — Olaf Stapledon

Everything in our foreign and domestic policy is a question of issue for the American people to vote on. — John Dingell

The National Security Council's real role is to coordinate the various activities of the government of the United States in the furtherance of American foreign policy. — Oliver North

Many of the overlapping crises in American life, from our foreign policy disasters to the housing bubble to the rate of out-of-wedlock births, can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity - one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition - at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that's simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. — Ross Douthat

I guess, then, that is what I find troublesome about this plan. It is too logical, too clever, too carefully thought out, and, most important of all, it has to be carried out in secret, which means that if the American public knew about it, they would be appalled and would not be supportive of it. — J.W. Amran

No, [the U.S.] has made it clear that we consider a peaceful resolution an essential aspect of American foreign policy. This I believe to be a situation understood by China, but again, it is important to not sound too truculent. Taking on a billion-plus Chinese is not an enterprise which one should enter lightly. — Henry A. Kissinger

Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals. — Michael Parenti

I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America. — Joe Biden

We need American foreign policy that tells the world very clearly that it is bad to be our enemy and good to be our friend. — Marco Rubio

Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy. — Frank Wolf

In that sense, Obama is America's first postmodern president. If his predecessors tended to see the world in terms of good and evil, Obama sees the world in terms of victims and victimizers - with the United States often in the role of victimizer. In that view, long favored by the academic left that shaped a young Barack Obama, American foreign policy is one long train of abuses, marked by casual aggression and eager imperiousness. — Stephen F. Hayes

There are those who would draw a sharp line between power politics and a principled foreign policy based on values. This polarized view - you are either a realist or devoted to norms and values - may be just fine in academic debate, but it is a disaster for American foreign policy. American values are universal. — Condoleezza Rice

The only way to Cuba is with the CIA. — Phil Ochs

But on the other hand, in discussion and debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy, Vietnam or the Middle East, for example, the issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I've repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do you have that entitles you to speak of these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things. — Noam Chomsky

American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy. — Tom DeLay

Bipartisanship on behalf of an imprudent policy can be folly, just as partisanship on behalf of a just cause can be wise. What is clear is that politics will not stop at the water's edge simply because presidents plead for it. American foreign policy will return to the tradition of Truman and Vandenberg only when the American public demands it. — James M. Lindsay

I'm a Muslim, we come from a Muslim community and we are very critical of western or American foreign policy. So if I've got the right and if other Muslims have got the right to criticize ... likewise everyone else has also got the right to criticize everything else. — Maajid Nawaz

American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term. — Samantha Power

The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens
and honor its own previous commitments
by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories. — Jimmy Carter

My job is to try to advance American foreign policy, to try to advance the president's agenda on democracy and human rights. — Condoleezza Rice

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west. — Samuel P. Huntington

Maybe you didn't understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn't matter. You held up your hand and said, "I'm willing to die for these worthless civilians. — Phil Klay

Foreign aid is neither a failure nor a panacea. It is, instead, an important tool of American policy that can serve the interests of the United States and the world if wisely administered. — Lee H. Hamilton

Both the American and the European approaches to foreign policy were the products of their own unique circumstances. Americans inhabited a nearly empty continent shielded from predatory powers by two vast oceans and with weak countries as neighbors. Since America confronted no power in need of being balanced, it could hardly have occupied itself with the challenges of equilibrium even if its leaders had been seized by the bizarre notion of replicating European conditions amidst a people who had turned their backs on Europe. — Henry Kissinger

We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might. — Theodore C. Sorensen

America is a unique place. The value part of American foreign policy is something I think is very laudable, but it is uniquely American. And it is part of what makes America special. — Michael Oren

Pakistan is, I always feel, hopeful. You know, our system of government is not, and the system of foreign policy whereby we do whatever is asked of us as long as the price is right only proves to fundamentalist outfits and to militant groups that when we talk of things like democracy, when we talk of things like foreign policy, what we're really talking about is being pro-American. — Fatima Bhutto

Graham Greene, as I understand it, was quite outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy. — Brendan Fraser

Of course you are American,' he said, and waived his hand, like waving away the sentiment. 'What other country can throw away money sending its people to live with savages? — Tony D'Souza

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001. — Russell Baker

I'm sorry that I can't snap my fingers and undo 50 years of bad American foreign policy. — Harry Browne

Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar-American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations - these were all ideas of the progressive left. — Kai Bird

The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy. — Aaron McGruder

The libertarian creed ... offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy. — Murray Rothbard

One of the many, many salutary aspects of Barack Obama's impending presidential nomination is the sea change his victory marks in the battle for the mind-set of the American foreign policy establishment. — Eric Alterman

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined. — P. J. O'Rourke

I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity. — Jeane Kirkpatrick

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy.
None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Current public diplomacy and foreign policy making reduces the role of American citizens to mere spectators. The USIA's model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of economic globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to clients throughout the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of people, particularly the world's poor, is strictly controlled. Such a commercial package speaks first and foremost for government 'partners,' the Fortune 500 corporations, which are the primary beneficiaries as well as the bankrollers of the American political process. This is a packaged story of America that is incomplete and undemocratic. Where do workers and communities fit into the story? How do private citizens play a part in building dialogue across cultures? — Nancy Snow

Everyone in the Middle East pretty much wants to come and be an American citizen, but pretty much everybody is angry with the U. S. foreign policy. — Mohamed ElBaradei

American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it. — Archibald MacLeish

American foreign policy is not understood by the vast majority of American people. And that this is due to a media that in this country is suppressed by Washington and by the owners of this media, who often tend to be corporate entities close to the [White House] and very often are arms manufacturers with a vested interest in chaos [in] the Middle East. And as a result Americans do not actually get both sides of the story. — Denis Halliday

I'm going to be bringing people into the public diplomacy function of the department who are going to change from just selling us in the old USIA way to really branding foreign policy, branding the department, marketing the department, marketing American values to the world and not just putting out pamphlets. — Colin Powell

Frankly, I do not know how to effect a permanency in American foreign policy. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy. — John Lewis Gaddis

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity. — James Fallows

It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy. — Michael Ignatieff

We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference. — Florence King

American strategic [nuclear] forces do not exist solely for the purpose of deterring a Soviet nuclear threat or attack against the U.S. itself. Instead, they are intended to support U.S. foreign policy. — Colin S. Gray

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry. — Henry A. Kissinger

If America was trying to keep the bubonic plague out of its hemisphere, Canadians would import it just to show their independence of American foreign policy. — Barbara Amiel

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern. — Henry A. Kissinger

beyond their right - and now they would be made to pay for it. Envy was being acted out, as never before.'62 It led to the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War. Today, I find envy laced through the statements of European and Indian intellectuals about America. Arundhati Roy's essay after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington is an example. Like many anti-American intellectuals writing in the days after the attack, Roy claimed that it was the direct result of American foreign policy - the implication being that America somehow deserved what had happened. There is widespread anti-American sentiment in the world which regards the United States as arrogant, indifferent to human suffering, consumerist, and contemptuous of international law. Much of this is probably correct, but I find that some of it is inspired by envy of America's success. — Gurcharan Das

Sure, tactically and in the short term, we'll do all right, but in the long term, these types of policies always fail, and you know why, because there will come a time that we need the same American public - that we kept everything hidden from - to support the policy either with their blood or money. — J.W. Amran

I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region. — Madeleine Albright

No foreign policy will stick unless the American people are behind it. And unless Congress understands it. And unless Congress understands it, the American people aren't going to understand it. — W. Averell Harriman

American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. — Charles Stanley

Foreign policy will require a strategic agility that, whenever possible, gets ahead of problems, strengthens U.S. security and alliances, and promotes American interests and credibility. — Chuck Hagel

It is important to remember that bureaucratic politics and rivalry are not just matters of competing for primacy in foreign policy - although they are that too. Rather, most bureaucratic competition comes from the fact that these bureaucracies often have overlapping jurisdictions on policy matters and that each may have legitimate but differing responsibilities. For example, both the CIA and the Defense Department have large intelligence-gathering operations, and at times these overlap and compete; at the same time, the State Department and Defense Department both have important but very different responsibilities in American foreign policy-making, and it is quite understandable that these are not always in exact accord. — Howard J. Wiarda

President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president - his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins. — Ben Shapiro

First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies. — Michael Mandelbaum

The great divide in American foreign policy thinking is between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power. — Charles Krauthammer

American foreign policy has been - and must continue to be - based on unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist and to be free from terror. — Howard Berman