Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes

The United Nations is a means. It is not an end for American foreign policy.

In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism.

Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work.

I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

The most obvious difference between international relations and domestic politics is that international relations take place in anarchy, whereas politics within states is conditioned by hierarchy.

The Constitution is an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.

There is no way that any major international problem anywhere in the world can be solved efficiently with the United States sitting on the sideline.

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

Preserve U. S. sovereignty and freedom of action by marginalizing the United Nations.

The United States does not feel any need to consult with anybody … except when it suits them.

When America rejected the League, she had deliberately chosen to rest solely upon treaties with the sanction of public opinion alone…

Americans must step back and realize that an effective foreign policy is very difficult to devise, and we must present a united front to make it work.

Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.

At the U.N., I routinely encounter countries that do not want to impose sanctions or even to enforce those already on the books. The hard-line sanctions skeptics have their own self-interested reasons for opposing sanctions, but they ground their opposition in claims that America uses sanctions to inflict punishment for punishment's sake.

My work at the United Nations discomforted some members of the U.S. government, which exercises its power beyond collective understandings and international law.

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.

My observation on most people in national governments is that they have very little interest in and very little knowledge of the multinational institutions.

No self-respecting country - especially one with our clout and proud history - should sign up to a proposal that surrenders the power to veto our foreign and trade policy to another entity.

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

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

The United Nations has come under the control of outlaw nations and self-serving special interest groups.

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.

Ultimate authority in a global system remains with sovereigns. Governments will not have it any other way: politicians face instant rejection from their electorate if they allow transnational authorities to dictate terms.