Ronald Lauder Quotes

A great country can have no such thing as a little war.

I am very, very, very concerned about the United States getting drawn into an endless war, year after year after year.

Nobody has ever said in the United States government that we are going to war next month. No decision has been made by the president because, as he said to the United Nations, he wants the United Nations to live up to its responsibilities and he wants Saddam Hussein to cooperate.

America is always fighting. We're the one that wants to go to World War III with Russia over Ukraine. So we're the ones always fighting. We're the ones putting up a lot of the money for NATO disproportionately - a lot.

I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide.

America cannot commit to go to war on behalf of 50 countries around the world because that is the formula that is one day going to break down and break out into war.

When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances for waiting and for patience is over. Too many lives have been lost, too many billions of dollars have been spent for us to trust the president on another tired and failed policy that's opposed by generals and experts, Democrats and Republicans, Americans and many of the Iraqis themselves.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

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.

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

Do we really want a world in which every country feels entitled to attack any other that might someday threaten it?

We send billions of taxpayer dollars abroad and what do we get in return? Disrespect, disdain, and ultimately violence.

The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government

Nations want the United States to fight their wars, until they go bad.

The United States cannot have the image of warmongers, with all the potential consequences it could have for our respective countries.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, when the focus suddenly turned toward Iraq, I suddenly thought, 'What on earth had Iraq got to do with the war on terror?'

The war in Afghanistan, the first war of the twenty-first century, shows the United States doing what it wants to do, not caring about who it antagonizes, not caring about the effects on neighboring regions.

We provide an enormous amount of resources, particularly with regard to military resources, to countries all over the world. And in many cases, those countries are not compensating the American taxpayer for the commitment that we're making to their security.

I don't worry about superpower confrontation. You know, I lived through the Cold War days, and where everybody was worried about a Soviet Union armed to the teeth. I think we're going to get along fine with Russia, and I don't see them as internationally ambitious.

I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake.

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war - 10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation - the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States.

I wouldn't go to war over Ukraine.

We are not interested in a proxy war. Our objective is to change Russia's behavior.

I think it's going to be remembered as the last major war on planet Earth, if we're lucky, if we maintain our foreign policy properly. It will be remembered as the last time major countries had to put people in the field and put them in harm's way. It may be the last of all human nature wars, which is a nice way to remember any kind of a war, as the last one.

Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it.