Paul Keating Quotes

Very near the heart of all foreign affairs is the relationship between policy and military power.

No American President should ever take any option off the table.

I think most Americans believe that although it's better not to use military force if you can avoid it, that the world simply doesn't provide us the luxury of giving away military force as an important tool of foreign policy.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

The American people need to tell their member of Congress that we need a strong defense to protect us and to prevent wars. We can't get away with simply leading from behind and gutting our defenses.

I am the commander in chief of the United States armed forces, and Iraq is gonna have to ultimately provide for its own security.

If I were President I would veto arms sales to countries we damn well know our going to shoot our ass the minute our backs are turned.

There is no issue of greater importance to the U.S. Senate than war and peace.

Armchair generals assume that nations decide on their foreign policy objectives and then subordinate everything else to achieving them. Life is more complicated. Threats, opportunities and risks are always uncertain, but the economic costs of maximum preparedness are definite.

The Mutual Security Act was intended not to fight a war but to prevent a war.

If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately. So I think it's a cost-benefit ratio. The more that we put into the State Department's diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget as we deal with the outcome of an apparent American withdrawal from the international scene.

You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic because Iran is a grave threat.

I was a policy office in my final tour in the Navy, a Russian policy officer, and we were always thinking about our interactions and how they would affect the country 10, 20 years from now.

President Obama's greatest failure is his failure regarding foreign policy and national security.

No one wants to friend or follow covert info about Pakistan's nuclear policy.

We're in danger of breaking our army and preventing our national leaders from having the flexibility to confront not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but crises around the globe.

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.

War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.

I said it was my feeling that the American people would struggle for peace, and that has since been underscored by the President of these United States.

Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?

I remain committed to a balanced policy, which will protect our national interests both on our eastern border - I mean with Russia - and of course with the European Union.

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

So I think that our foreign policy, the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

There's nothing wrong with being a Conservative and coming up with a Conservative believe in foreign policy where we have a strong national defense and we don't go to war so carelessly.