Jay Rockefeller Quotes

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.

Many Europeans are concerned that stronger sanctions are a slippery slope toward war unless the U.S. is at the table.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

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

Most people are disturbed by the shift from deterrence to preemption but the fact is that in international relations, deterrence has a poor track record

No American President should ever take any option off the table.

Presidents should plan for war before they threaten war.

There are two things that are very expensive in international relations: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail

We went in there [the Iraq War invasion] with a complete misunderstanding, regionally and inside Iraq, of what was going on. I don’t ever want that to happen again.

Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence are staples. The four countries of highest interest - Russia, China, Iran and North Korea - are constants.

A key player with respect to sanctions is, of course, China. And so, if a military option were to be exercised, then obviously we would play very heavily in that process. But that's not a decision, fortunately, that the intelligence community makes.

Bob Gates has unusual standing in the debate about the Obama administration's foreign policy: He was defense secretary for both a hawkish President George W. Bush and a wary President Obama. He understood Bush's desire to project power and Obama's skepticism.

You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic because Iran is a grave threat.

Both Israel and America should acknowledge that scraps of information cannot serve as the basis for action against Iran, and they should find new criteria for such a decision.

In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

President Bush has a track record of making the right decisions when it comes to national security.

Both Bibi and Obama realize that they are going to have to face the problem of Iran together.

In my experience, in bringing coercive diplomacy to bear against Slobodan Milosevic, no bomb strike was more important than maintaining NATO's cohesion.

Foreign policy is all about a universe of bad decisions, imperfect decisions; every situation is different. The dynamics, the atmospherics, the people, the pressures, the geopolitical realities shift.

There is very little hope that the United States or anyone else can do much to stabilize Iraq, Libya, Syria or Egypt. Stabilizing Iran, and bringing it back into the family of nations, is much more possible. That would be a 'win' for both sides.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

You should never take military intervention off the table. When you do so, you give an out to a rogue nation or rogue actors.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.