James Baker Quotes

No matter who occupies the Presidency, Washington tends to unilateralism.

The world of high-stakes international diplomacy can be rough and tumble, but it's more often than not a procession of suits and summits, protocol sessions and photo ops.

We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington.

We are living in a different world now. You can see it everywhere in international relations: It was noteworthy that, after his visit to Washington, the Chinese president's next stop was Saudi Arabia.

Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.

What Ottawa and Washington used to think about Turkey or Iran was not very important because we really didn't think much about either, but now what we think about them is extremely important - to ourselves and to many other peoples.

Americans expect us to go to Washington for the right reason, and not just to mingle with the right people.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

Where is the evidence that Washington's world view sways the multitude of nations? To enlist support for its wars in Korea, Vietnam and in the Gulf, the United States had to resort to a lot of bribery and threats. At the United Nations, the US has, with noteworthy regularity, been on the minority side in voting on resolutions.

The bloke who ends up sitting in the White House partially controls what we [the British] get up to.

Don't think we've ever convinced the American people that it's not in our interest to be isolationists. Our tendency for the first century, maybe century-and-a-half of our existence was to be isolationists, to hide behind the two mighty oceans, to become self-sufficient, and to follow Washington's caution not to become involved in foreign entanglements and alliances.

This is a pretty difficult time to run international relations. The President has been so absorbed in domestic troubles that he isn’t able to give any time, and more than that the whole action when it does come into my sphere is colored by solely his domestic problems.

The very nature of executive decisions as to foreign policy is political, not judicial.

Foreign policy involves a good deal of domestic policy.

We have noted that the federal Constitution put the permanent control of the nation's foreign interests in the hands of the President and the Senate, which to some extent frees the Union's general policy from direct and daily popular control. One should not therefore assert without qualification that American democracy controls the state's external affairs..

Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.

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

The British claim to have a special relationship with the U.S., but if you mention this in Washington, no one knows what you are talking about.

America has been a force for much good in the world. But we should learn from the mistakes of an over-expansionist foreign policy and return to the restraint that George Washington and John Quincy Adams advocated.

I would rather not meddle in the domestic politics of the United States.

Washington's impulsive use of power is a danger to America and to the world.

We've just got to have American strength on the world stage. When Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, the Russians and other countries in the world will know they're dealing with a strong American president.

We know that Europe loves President Obama. He had adoring crowds. The press loves Obama. The question is how will this date end? Okay? The question is, to what end? Why do they love President Obama? They love his personal story, they love his wife. North Korea, China and Russia don't really care about Michelle's arms and, you know, whether they gave an iPod to the Queen, okay?

We have never meddled in the domestic affairs of any state and we never will.

As president, I will stand up to the great human rights tests of our time - in China, Russia, and the Middle East. We must send a signal to our allies and adversaries that America is back in the leadership business.