Susan Rice Quotes

No American President should ever take any option off the table.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

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.

What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.

In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized.

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

The policy of the United States does not flow from transitory considerations.

The ability of the Congress of the United States to have any strategic view [of foreign policy] is virtually nil.

It is the President alone who must make the major decisions of our foreign policy.

When I made the decision on Iraq, I went around the room to everybody at that table, every principal. You in? Any doubts? Nothing from anybody.

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

Political considerations can be taken into account only as long as they do not make demands that are militarily improper or impossible.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem—and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

National security looks different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa.

Ultimately, when you have to deal with a whole country, priorities change.

[Hillary Clinton] is going to decide war, peace, and health, education, livelihood for my kids. I want the best person.

America has maintained a prohibition on negotiating with terrorists for good reason.

I will be as careful as I can in making the most significant decisions any president and commander-in-chief can make about sending our men and women into harm's way.

I can't speak for all Iranians, but I think that many of them would be uncomfortable with Ahmadinejad if Iran had nuclear weapons and he had his finger on the button. But the reality is that Iran's system of government is actually very complex. It has a lot of checks and balances, and neither Ahmadinejad nor any Iranian president would ever have his finger on the button. There are too many people involved in a decision of that magnitude.

Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.

We have zero strategic thinking out of our White House. And we have a national security structure that has lost its way when it comes to strategic thinking and strategic decision-making.

What the American people understand is that I look at what we need to get done to keep the American people safe and to move our interests forward, and I make those decisions.

I think it's critical that we return national security issues to the center of the overall political debate in America.

I think what you're going to get from President-elect [ Donald] Trump is all of his folks together - Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, John Kelly, CIA, Homeland Security, everyone that you would want in the room, making decisions about that particular document and treaties like that document as to how we're going move forward.

I think that the only time we will really know what then-President Trump is going to do about the set of challenges that confront him is after he has sat down with his advisers as the commander in chief, when he's looking at the threats and the intelligence from the standpoint of being the number one decider, when he's hearing from his secretary of defense, his chairman, who was the same chairman President Obama had, Chairman Joe Dunford, who is an outstanding public servant, who has led our anti-ISIL effort, on which we're making great progress.