Lee H. Hamilton Quotes

Foreign policy matters cannot be intelligently decided in a large general meeting.

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

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

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.

I'm sorry that I can't snap my fingers and undo 50 years of bad American foreign policy.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

There are legitimate, even powerful arguments, to be made against the Bush administration's foreign policy. But those arguments are complicated, hard to explain, and, in the end, not all that sensational.

The matter of international relations is very subtle and exquisite.

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

Power alone is respected and ... in order to gain peace, the United States has no alternative but to wield it

I don’t talk to countries that exhibit bad behavior.

Its easy for a country to talk about global affairs but unless you can do something about it, you are not a player.

No country can dictate its laws to the world.

Isolationism has been a calamity.

The American nation cannot reach across the planet and pick the leadership of other countries.

All foreign policy is the intervention of one nation's domestic politics into another nation's domestic politics.

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

Too frequent or too quick a resort to force can also undermine the authority of power. Not all use of force is created equal. Other states will grant authority to the use of force, implicitly if not otherwise, if it falls within the bonds of justice and reason; if they think a use of force does not fall within such bonds, they will withdraw their legitimate consent, and thereby undermine the authority of power.

People tend to leave foreign affairs to governments because they think the leaders of government have all the information and know better.

…sanctions applied to a large nation meant war. They bred “incurable hatreds”.

President William Clinton is a man who thinks international affairs means dating a girl from out of town.

My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos.

People are always asking me in interviews, 'What do you think of foreign affairs?' I just say, 'I've had a few.'

Politicians often call for sanctions as a way of sounding tough when they don't want to take riskier measures.

Trump's foreign policy is not so much immoral as it is amoral.