Peter Singer Quotes

General Petraeus is not a miracle worker. He can not be successful unless the president creates greater confidence within his own team about the decisions which the president has himself made.

In foreign policy you have to wait twenty-five years to see how it comes out.

Foreign policy is all about a universe of bad decisions, imperfect decisions; every situation is different. The dynamics, the atmospherics, the people, the pressures, the geopolitical realities shift.

Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.

The President never intends to get into any kind of war situation. He gets carried away by events.

I think if I had to do it over again, I'd do it the same way. I would just put more resources into getting the public diplomacy part much stronger than we were able to.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

In foreign policy, the only thing worse than not doing something is doing something that fails or makes the situation worse.

One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.

Looking back over my more than a half century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we've been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.

I’ve worked as a leader for many years and I’ve always trained myself to be prepared for the worst.

The approach of danger always lends precision to the diplomatic art.

Ninety percent of foreign policy is reacting to whatever's happening out there.

The great problem now is that we don’t know what to do.

Our foreign policy is inadequate, outmoded and misdirected .... If we go on as we are, soon—in the fashion of the cat on a hot tin roof—we shall be skipping from one crisis to another all over the globe, unable to get our footing anywhere.

The President has full responsibility, which cannot be shared, for military decisions in a world in which the difference between safety and cataclysm can be a matter of hours or even minutes.

The United States has become geopolitically hobbled seemingly interested in grand strategic initiatives or transformative diplomacy, as its attention constantly dances from one crisis to another.

What I'm saying is it is our responsibility to exercise due diligence, to ask the tough questions, to get the evidence before we make those very costly decisions about how and when and where our military is used.

Foreign policy exactly suits Obama's strong points as a leader, which turn out not to be giving the masses a clear sense of direction and hope, but instead exercising good judgment on a case-by-case basis while thinking many steps ahead of the present moment.

We're in danger of breaking our army and preventing our national leaders from having the flexibility to confront not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but crises around the globe.

The important thing is that we recognize our President's leadership, that he is not saying: I am going to walk away from this. He is saying: I am going to do the right thing.

As a world leader, America must be prepared to confront any challenge.

The Obama administration rarely demonstrated the ability to shift gears and change policy in its first year. Even in the face of historic events such as the continuing demonstrations against Iran's regime, it stuck devotedly to prior plans.

I would hate to see operations in the Congo held hostage to Sierra Leone but I really think that's the way it's got to be. At one point we've got to decide to get it right and we've got to be professional.

No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.