John Kerry Quotes

I'm sorry that I can't snap my fingers and undo 50 years of bad American foreign policy.

If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace.

Tehran believes it's none of our business or anybody else's to decide the future of personalities in other countries.

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.

Why did we go to war? Why did we pick people from South Carolina, California, and all the places in between to go to a foreign land and risk their lives and have some die? To make sure that Saddam Hussein could do no more damage to the region or us than he has already done.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

Foreign policy is something Americans care about when the economy is good, and when it isn't, they hardly notice it. It's hard to worry about what happens in the Mideast when you don't have a job in the Midwest.

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that.

United States foreign policy, which includes national security, is literally disintegrating before our eyes.

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

Kneejerk interventionism or kneejerk isolationism is the wrong course for Britain.

It's alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.

It kind of scares me, the notion that we're going to be injecting ourselves into other countries' affairs when they're not posing a threat to our security. I wouldn't be telling Israel what to do.

The internal affairs of other countries has a big impact on American interests.

The [foreign] policy of the United States is modeled on interventionism and aggression. It is logical that we should always be very suspicious.

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.

Promoting democracy is one goal of U. S. foreign policy dating back at least 100 years. But it has always been one goal of many, often negated and outweighed by other competing interests.

The question of when you intervene is probably the toughest question of American foreign policy.

For the 30 years I have been involved with U. S. national security, our policy has been shaped by the assumption that we could shape other countries’ policies throughout the world. This has always been a bit of a myth.

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.

The foreign policies of Japan in the past half-century revolved around two pivotal points. The one was security and the other equality.

The United States is proud of her remoteness from the old world, her freedom from entanglement in its quarrels, her isolation. Yet in her relatively very short history as an independent state she has fought at least six foreign wars while her troops have landed on foreign soil on nearly a hundred occasions. Not one of those wars was for the purpose of defending American soil.

It’s not America’s job to fix the Middle East. Our job is to look after our own interests..