Gerald R. Ford Quotes

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 U.S. should never get involved where we have no clear national interest. We should not intervene militarily in a country like Syria, where we can’t separate friend from foe and might end up arming the very people who hate us the most.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood.

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

When the commander-in-chief sends Americans to fight and die, it should be only to protect our vital national interests, not for his own personal, political gain.

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

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

From the very beginning, the American republic has never shrunk from foreign wars …. There has scarcely been a year since its founding that American soldiers haven’t been overseas … American foreign policy largely consists of doctrines about when and where to intervene in other people’s countries.

The organizing premise of any nation's foreign policy is the protection of the homeland.

It is just as important to define the limit beyond which we will not intervene as it is to convince our people that we cannot find security in an isolationist party.

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.

As long as Americans believe that their country has vital interests everywhere on earth, they will behave the same.

President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true.

President Trump's seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency.

I know I will be severely criticized by the interventionists in America when I say we should not enter a war unless we have a reasonable chance of winning.

The truth is that modern governments sit at the head of a well-funded security apparatus. They are told that foreign military adventures put domestic populations at risk and they give them the thumbs up anyway.

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

I happen to be one of those in the antiwar part of things who actually supported Bill Clinton when he sent the cruise missiles in to take out bin Laden. I had thought we had the right to use Special Forces to go in for bin Laden. He had attacked American embassies. He attacked ships. And so, I didn't see any need to coddle the Taliban.

I think Obama sees everything through one lens. Doing nothing in the face of the slaughter in Syria is not only shameful, it is unrealistic. This approach leaves Syria as a broken country and a breeding ground for extremists for decades.

People of the United States have to really consider whether they want to be an empire. Sweden is not worried about terrorism. New Zealand is not worried about terrorism. Holland is not worried about terrorism. Why not be a modest little country without all of these enormous ambitions?

The United States often finds itself in a situation where if it goes in militarily then it is criticized for going in militarily, and if it doesn't go in militarily, then people say, why aren't you doing something militarily?

It's just a matter of time before we go into Iraq and get Saddam Hussein. I think just before Bush falls below 50 percent, that's when we'll be going.

America roused to a righteous anger has always been a force for good. States that have been supporting if not Osama bin Laden, people like him need to feel pain. If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution.

As soon as one nation claims the right to take preventive action, other countries will naturally do the same.