Douglas Feith Quotes

…though the American government did much to encourage the organs of the League, the fact that it stood aside, sharing neither the rights nor the duties of the League powers, was a fatal handicap to joint action.

History asks of us that we never act unilaterally, never alone, but only within the alliances of NATO, the United Nations and the European Union as it is clearly specified in international law

I'm not a multilateralist against anybody. I'm a multilateralist because I believe in a multilateral order.

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

If the U.N. didn't exist, we'd be inventing it right now.

I have always seen the United States as a force of good. And I have learned that there is the idealistic part about what we can do at the U.N. and there is a doable part. And I have learned what is more doable.

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

We would have to invent the U.N. if we did not have it, which is not an original thought.

Multilateralism is the democracy of international society.

Multilateralism may be little more than a polite way of camouflaging what is in practice unilateralism with allies.

I am totally committed to the cooperation between the African Union and the United Nations.

There is, and there will be, an increasing demand for a principled global security provider, for a superpower that believes in multilateralism and cooperation.

In both world wars, Britain understood that our national sovereignty could only endure if we cooperated with other nations. That our fate is inexorably bound with that of our neighbours.

From Nato to the U.N. and the E.U., the generation that lived through the first half of the 20th century knew they needed to create a new world order. An order with rules and institutions which, however imperfect, could act both as constraints on individual countries going rogue and as catalysts for co-operation for mutual benefit.

If the U.N. is ineffective, the whole concept of multilateralism will collapse.

There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

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

As we have seen, the wireless and the airplane have made the world so small and nations so dependent on each other that the only alternative to war is the United States of the World.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

I have concluded that the U.N. can do a few things well.

Our alliances should be understood as a means to expand our influence, not as a constraint on our power. The expansion of democracy and freedom in the world should be a shared interest and value with all nations.

Isolationism is over.

The key to U.N. reform is giving Americans a clearer picture of what the U.N. is and what it isn't, what it can be and what it can't be.

As New Zealanders, we've been in on the United Nations from the very beginning, played a role in the drafting of the charter - it means a lot to us that those processes are followed.

The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the U.N. is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them.