Chuck Hagel Quotes

The government should not present the anomaly which it now presents—a government the freest, perhaps the most democratic in the world with reference to local and domestic matters in which you rule yourselves as fully as any people in the world, while in your foreign affairs, your relations with other countries, whether peaceful or warlike, commercial, financial, or otherwise, you may have no more voice than the people of Japan.

The U. S. is not the Boss, not the Boss any longer.

No self-respecting country - especially one with our clout and proud history - should sign up to a proposal that surrenders the power to veto our foreign and trade policy to another entity.

I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.

There will always be nations. The United States will last a long, long time, I believe. France and Germany and Japan, China, other nations, they're going to exist. But they're losing their significance and ability to deal with certain matters.

Here we encounter two conflicting concepts with which we must come to grips in our time: the idea of national solidarity and the idea of international cooperation.

In a shrinking world, the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.

Multilateralism is the democracy of international society.

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.

I don’t think that we should ever apply our military power unilaterally…. If we cannot persuade like-minded, friendly nations of the wisdom of our policy, then maybe we should rethink the policy.

America must always lead on the world stage.

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.

Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.

The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.

International politics is no longer a zero-sum game but a multi-dimensional arena where cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously. Gone is the age of blood feuds. World leaders are expected to lead in turning threats into opportunities.

To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me.

There are nearly 200 countries and a population of over 6 billion in today's world. International affairs should be addressed by all countries through consultations rather than monopolised by a few powers.

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.

Isolationism is over.

The foreign policy of this government is driven by politics - to extend a revolution worldwide. My objective with regards to foreign relations is to benefit all Venezuelans.

My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.

Transferring our sovereignty and decisionmaking power to the WTO, to the United Nations, or any other international body is not in the long-term interests of our people.

President Obama's consistent agenda has been to weaken the United States and our allies in pursuit of a more 'balanced' global power structure.

As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations.