Irving Kristol Quotes

English [foreign] policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.

I talk a great deal to prior Secretaries of State about policy issues.

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

The world of high-stakes international diplomacy can be rough and tumble, but it's more often than not a procession of suits and summits, protocol sessions and photo ops.

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

So I think that we're in a very heightened and somewhat unusual period of politics and polling around the countries that New Zealanders take close interest in.

Obama's foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront.

The matter of international relations is very subtle and exquisite.

The way you change foreign policy is by raising the domestic political cost of the policy.

Foreign Policy has to be less foreign.

Very near the heart of all foreign affairs is the relationship between policy and military power.

You can't build a foreign policy on the presence of an individual [a particular foreign leader].

One of the things a Secretary of State shouldn't do is try to characterize foreign leaders. We have to take them as they are.

The United States may have to abandon its policy of avoiding entangling alliances.

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

One is treading on very delicate ground when you have to consider the public opinion in China, Japan, the League of Geneva, and at home. It is pretty hard to avoid using a word which may arouse unintended repercussions in one or the other of those half a dozen localities

Foreign policy mandarins often wish the public would leave them alone so that they can get on with the serious business of statecraft.

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

Foreign policy is like plumbing. You never notice it till it breaks and then all hell breaks loose.

Nor should we assume that a nation's foreign policy is simply the logical outgrowth of general national conceptions. It is rather the result of many diverse forces, practical as well as patriotic.

Never for a moment, have the responsible and instructed statesmen in charge of the foreign affairs of the United States failed to consider themselves bound to insist upon this policy .... Almost every President and Secretary of State has re-stated the doctrine with vigor and emphasis in the discussion of the diplomatic affairs of his day.

Even allies don’t share every single interest that you have. That’s a law of nature in the international system. They will tell you most of what you need to know but there may be some things that they don’t tell you that you need to know in order to formulate your policy as wisely as you can.

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

Politically, foreign policy never matters until it matters, and then it matters a lot.

Be more conscious about what you say about foreign policy issues, because they are complicated.