Fouad Ajami Quotes

Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.

[America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom …. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

Alliances do have to deal with political realities.

Multilateralism may be little more than a polite way of camouflaging what is in practice unilateralism with allies.

The simple fact about alliances is that different nations have their own interests.

The American nation cannot reach across the planet and pick the leadership of other countries.

All foreign policy is the intervention of one nation's domestic politics into another nation's domestic politics.

It is not the Soviet Union or indeed any other big powers who need the United States for their protection. It is all the others.

You should never make alliances with a decadent nation like France and a semi-barbarous nation like Russia

At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.

Democratically elected leaders, forced to accommodate the real forces that shape their nation-state’s future—capital and the economic and military interests of more-powerful states—do so only to face the ire of their own citizens, who see themselves (perhaps rightly) as the losers of these compromises.]

It looks like the so-called "winners" of the Cold War are determined to have it all, and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone.

I think overall our national security is strengthened if we are able to make the decisions that we need and the alliances that we believe in outside the current structures of the European Union.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

You know in the West they support realistic forces.

Finally we are a nation with some conscience. It means alliances are extremely important when they're based on a national interest. We have to have the ability to sustain our presence within those alliances.

Our alliances and our credibility are crucial elements of our working capital in advancing America's interests in the world, and they have been eroded over the last four years.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

Obama's foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront.

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

The United States has got to adopt a policy of befriending and creating allies around the world.

From 8,000 miles away... I would not judge a fellow soldier from a friendly nation and how they are employing their resources.

Turkey has worked alongside its allies from the beginning.

I met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, visited our allies in the Arab Gulf, traveled to Tunisia and Iraq, met with President Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, and visited our allies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

It came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests.