Joe Klein Quotes

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

Obama behaves like a centrist who leans tentatively left on certain social programs but boldly right on military force and civil liberties.

I am not a neoconservative.

George W. Bush is always protesting that he has the fate of the world in mind and bangs on about the 'freedom-loving peoples' he's seeking to protect. I'd love to meet a freedom-hating people.

The 'freedom agenda' of George W. Bush's second inaugural was a noble concept - but in practice, it offered ignoble results.

Robert Kagan said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it.

I include Rudy Giuliani here who, in many ways, is more comfortable as a neocon.

One of the characteristics of New Labour - and Miliband is irredeemably of that species - is that, in the guise of a new liberal language, it has adopted the age-old default mode of British foreign policy, namely military intervention.

One of the extraordinary features of the Blair government has been its slavish support for the central tenets of Bush's foreign policy - above all, the war in Iraq. During the Cold War, the Wilson government resisted the suggestion that it should send troops to Vietnam.

Virtually every one of the most far-right neocon Bush officials - including Dick Cheney himself - has spent years now praising Obama for continuing their terrorism policies which Obama the Senator and Presidential Candidate once so harshly denounced.

George W. Bush was a very bad president. The Iraq war was a big mistake. The U.S.A. needed a political change. I hoped Barack Obama could be a good president, but I'm disappointed. He hasn't done well.

George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

From 2002 to the end of his presidency, George W. Bush routinely was accused by the Left of 'creating chaos:' chaos in Iraq, chaos in Afghanistan, chaos in the Muslim world, chaos among our allies.

I don't know how you define 'neoconservatism,' but I think it's associated with trying to spread open political systems and democracy.

Neoconservatism is a blend of realism and idealism. We have the idealism of the liberals but we look at the reality of the world.

If Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush had ever been in combat themselves, they might not have sent troops to Iraq.

George W. Bush … was ideologically obsessed.

The next time some neocon, demanding whatever military intervention neocons are demanding that day, invokes Hitler or Munich or appeasement, lock up your silver.

I'm not much of an economic conservative, and I'm not conservative at all on foreign policy.

I think the Bush Administration was bound and determined on regime change, and we will be paying the price of that for some time to come.

In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.

Bob Gates has unusual standing in the debate about the Obama administration's foreign policy: He was defense secretary for both a hawkish President George W. Bush and a wary President Obama. He understood Bush's desire to project power and Obama's skepticism.

Neoconservative Republican President George W. Bush took office determined to aggressively export American democratic values through conflict. The Iraq war, a misdirected response to 9/11, tacked trillions of dollars on to the deficit while further destabilising the Middle East.

Washington is agonizingly slow at learning from its mistakes. Especially in the Middle East.

Now Republicans are a more interventionist party than they have been at any time since George W. Bush left office.