Chuck Hagel Quotes

In international relations, in foreign policy, a great deal has to do with historical circumstances, a great deal has to do with the sense and perception of people.

Great wars can only be fought by great powers.

Much of our national debate proceeds as if China and America were locked in a zero-sum game in which one's loss is precisely the other's gain.

All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence.

Is the balance of power a fixed and unalterable standard? Or is it not a standard perpetually varying, as civilization advances, and as new nations spring up, and take their place among established political communities?

What really matters for great powers is power—national economic and military strength—and that speaks loudly and clearly for itself.

Even a superpower has limits.

All small countries have the same problems and concerns about being protected from larger countries and their influences.

I'm in favour of a multi-polar world. I believe that every country has the right to defend its own interests.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.

President Obama, like every other leader on Earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don't cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.

Great powers reserve the right to police bad actors in their neighborhoods.

Of course as a small country you're not necessarily in the strongest negotiating position unless you're negotiating with other small countries.

I don't share the view that China and the U.S. need to reach some kind of strategic accommodation to carve up the Asia-Pacific region - that is an arrogant proposition and deeply insulting to other countries in the region, including Japan and potentially also India and Indonesia.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

Great powers engage.

The United States is the world's best hope; but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence.

The time has come to recognize that the U.S. will continue to exercise unprecedented power in a world where international rules are still unreliable and where security and advancing of the free democratic order still depend significantly on the possession and use of military might.

Power is the true reserve currency in international affairs.

It is the natural desire of each nation to use the other as an instrument of its own purposes and policies. By dint of our mutual dependence, your influence is amplified by our power. Our power is made more responsible and more effective by your influence.

The moment it became in the interests of one or the other of the Great Powers to alter the status quo, none of these treaty structures ever stood in the way of such alteration.

Political and security realities have reduced the scope of American unilateralism.

We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth.

Small countries such as Belgium would be well-advised to rally to the side of the strong if the wish to retain their independence.