Donald Rumsfeld Quotes

In this day and age, the U.S. and Europe do not have the luxury of focusing solely on a single region.

Oh dear. Oh dear. Why do all these old gentlemen feel so confident that they understand foreign affairs.

The US has been the leading terrorist state in the world for many years.

[Vladimir] Putin took a look at them [Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama] and said, I can push these guys around the world. These are children compared to me. Donald Trump is not a child.

I think what President [Barack] Obama has done is to chart a steady course. When I was there, the first four years we had a lot of cleanup to do. We inherited a lot of bad feelings from the [George W.] Bush administration, and much of what I spent my time doing was traveling around the world reassuring friends and allies.

If you get a President (Hillary) Clinton, you might well find, just as after Vietnam, that there is a retraction from Iraq and of American influence in the world. And in a couple of years the Europeans will be complaining about that too.

It is 60 years since the restoration of diplomatic relations, but relations between Japan and Russia have much deeper roots. In all, our diplomatic ties date back 150 years, more than 150 years now.

You have think tanks like the widely respected Atlantic Council that have published reports in the past year that have called Afghanistan a failing state.

We have seen very clearly over these past years that there are quite a few people who are sceptical, or let us put it another way, are cautious about the development of Russian-American relations, but the underlying fundamental interests of the United States and Russia demand that our relations be normalised.

If European countries want to cater to U.S. foreign policy interests, I don't think that they stand to gain anything.

Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama's naiveté during his final two years in office. As a result, America will be less safe as a result of the President's change in policy.

One of the things that I heard for years and years, never drive Russia and China together. And Obama has done that.

Seven-and-a-half years of the weak and feckless foreign policy of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has weakened America's place in the world and it has emboldened the enemies of our freedom.

[United States] are sovereign country, they are an independent country, but this is their limit; they don't have to interfere in any other country. Because of this interference for the last fifty years, that's why they are very good only in creating problems, not in solving problems. That's the problem with the American role.

From Russia for example, we have political support, which is different from the cooperation. We have cooperation for 60 years now, but now we have political support.

Our relationship with the United States is not reduced to questions of fighting terrorism and the Iraq war. German-American relations were so good for so many years because they extended deeply into the normal lives of people.

As regards Hillary C;inton's foreign policy actions and the powerful vested interests she seems gleefully beholden to, including all the biggest players in the military-industrial complex, I feel that she would be no better an actor on the world stage than Trump and whatever coalition of managers he might cobble together.

In my life, I have almost always been on the side of active foreign policy. But you need to know with whom you are cooperating. You need reliable partners.

The Donald Trump call in the president of Taiwan and of itself, as Henry Kissinger said, hasn't created some tremendous trouble in China. But what we don't know is whether this is just posturing or whether this is a policy change.

One of the proudest things of my three years in office is helping to restore a sense of respect for America around the world.

After the German abstention at the UN, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle commented that Germany doesn't always have to stand on the side of its traditional allies. Berlin can look for new partners all over the world.

There are a lot of bigger issues we have to be worrying about with respect to our relationship to China, and the longer they drag out the situation, the more difficult it is to get this relationship back on track.

Iraq was invaded to secure Israel and everybody knows it.

I think President George W. Bush contributed very directly to the fact that the status of America as the world's only superpower lasted for 20 years at most.

It is not wise for Chinese to do things to artificially disrupt relations with the U.S.