Lee Zeldin Quotes

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

You do not build a foreign policy based on one man.

The United Nations is a failed institution in its current form.

Americans must step back and realize that an effective foreign policy is very difficult to devise, and we must present a united front to make it work.

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

I don't know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.

Secretary Clinton has dramatically changed the face of U.S. foreign policy globally for the good. But I wish she had been unleashed more by the White House.

If governments do not want to work with the U.N. and the international organizations, there is a limit to what you can do. And there is also a limit to patience.

Without the U. N., world politics is inconceivable.

There is no way that any major international problem anywhere in the world can be solved efficiently with the United States sitting on the sideline.

The art of foreign policy is to help guide the inevitable.

You don’t do foreign policy unilaterally. Foreign policy is a team sport.

… unless the United Nations stops becoming simply a debating society for anti-American rhetoric, I'm going to show them the door.

International policy does not aim at exploiting local, specific conditions to widen zones of influence and create difficulties for another country. The goal of international policy is to insure universal fulfillment of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and to prevent a sharpening of international tensions and a strengthening of militarist and nationalist tendencies.

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

The United Nations is a means. It is not an end for American foreign policy.

People think that it only takes an American decision to solve this or that problem [in foreign affairs].

When I became secretary of state, I felt one of my primary jobs was building relationships around the world.

Foreign policy is painstakingly difficult, and if there is to be anything gained from the experience in Libya, it is how not to conduct world affairs.

I do think the U.S. has a moral and political leadership role to play.

It's one of my government's ambitions to secure a seat for Ireland on the U.N. Security Council so that we can play an even greater role in international affairs and try to build what we all believe in, which is a world of laws.

I think this country and the world would be far better off if the US is not an outlaw state.

In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism.

During the three decades of its existence, the effectiveness of the United Nations has, on the whole, tended to decrease, particularly in the field of peace and security and, more generally, all issues in which the developed countries feel they have important stakes.

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.