Martin Jacques Quotes

There has always been something less than wholesome about New Labour. But Blair for a long time had an easy ride. There was the whopping majority. There was the relief that the Tories were finally gone. There was the grand hyperbole.

The arming of a government can really only be done by another government. To be really effective, aid must be governmental.

Congress cannot—nor should it—run foreign policy on a day-to-day basis. That is a truism.

Truths! Do you think I could have created a government … with truths? You make history with ambition, not with truths.

Politics, you will observe, is the science of guessing right.

What is politics but business?

An International Congress [Summit]: the greatest of all Vanity Fairs …. Each Prime Minister thinks that he alone is capable of representing his country’s policy. Each Foreign Secretary thinks that the Premier knows nothing of diplomacy. Each professional ambassador thinks the same about his Foreign Secretary …. It is an orchestra of first violins.

Politics is the science of the second best.

Undertaking to explain our foreign policy in terms of our public opinion is to explain one mystery in terms of another.

The art of foreign policy is to help guide the inevitable.

Nations are equal in respect to each other, and entitled to claim equal consideration for their rights, whatever may be their relative dimensions or strength, or however greatly they may differ in government, religion, or manners. This perfect equality, and entire independence of all distinct states, is a fundamental principle of public law. It is a necessary consequence of this equality that each nation has a right to govern itself as it may think proper, and no one nation is entitled to dictate a form of government or religion, or a course of internal policy, to another. No state is entitled to take cognizance or notice of the domestic administration of another state, or of what passes within it as between the government and its own subjects

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

Government has much wider dimensions than merely managing an economy.

We now live not in an economic order or a political order, but in a political economy that is closely linked with military institutions and decisions.

Military security and a policy of detente are not contradictory but complementary.

Foreign policy involves a good deal of domestic policy.

In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan, and most especially the Pakistani Army and ISI, jeopardizes not only the prospect of our strategic partnership but Pakistan’s opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional interest.

Because of the economic crisis, China and the United States are bound together. This is a totally new phenomenon, and nobody will fight for ideology anymore. It’s all about business.

The engagement policy of détente made the United States number two in a world where it is dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best

Individual capitalists are in charge of a wide range of decisions which, because of their consequences for the general welfare of society, are in fact public policy decisions taken by private individuals.

Nor should we assume that a nation's foreign policy is simply the logical outgrowth of general national conceptions. It is rather the result of many diverse forces, practical as well as patriotic.

Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.

Politics is fate.

I do not do business with the [Chinese] government. If they want some work done, we connect them with firms that they can contract with. If they insist that they want to employ us, I do it for free and then ask them to go to others after that. This way we love each other.

I know the rule. I know law. I know economics. I know parliament. That's an explosive combination.