Roger Wicker Quotes

We should have been there shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Our concern is the instability of our government as an ally. We are playing again with national and global security matters.

A state worthy of the name has no friends—only interests. [This is a generalized expression of British Prime Minister John Henry Temple's statement a century earlier.

More and more countries, mostly all countries, do not want large American forces on their soil. That’s a reality. We can live in the denial of that, but we are also living in the reality of that.

What is most troubling about Mr. Putin's aggression in Crimea is that it reflects a growing disregard for America's credibility in the world. That has emboldened other aggressive actors - from Chinese nationalists to Al Qaeda terrorists and Iranian theocrats.

Hillary Clinton's Russian re-set policy gave Moscow permission to go from privately challenging U.S. foreign policy to publicly moving military hardware into Syria to prop up Bashar al-Assad and annexing Crimea from Ukraine. And Donald Trump seems to support the idea that Putin will be Putin. It's enough to leave America's allies confused.

You see, psychologically, Australia must understand it has to live in the region around it. Australia must find its security in Asia; it cannot find its security from Asia.

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.

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.

Turkey can be a bridge to regimes and actions the United States can't reach. Turkey can talk to people the United States can't talk to.

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

A war in the Taiwan Strait would destroy China's international relations overnight. It would destroy Chinese - Japanese relations, not to mention Chinese - American relations.

The long-term strategic goals of Iran and the long-term strategic goals of Turkey are close to the long-term strategic goals of the United States.

I don't share the view that China and the U.S. need to reach some kind of strategic accommodation to carve up the Asia-Pacific region - that is an arrogant proposition and deeply insulting to other countries in the region, including Japan and potentially also India and Indonesia.

More commonly, states choose to ally themselves with the United States out of a desire for U.S. protection from a regional threat. The United States has long be an attractive ally against intimidating neighbors: it is strong enough to shift a regional balance of power, and it generally does so without conquering its allies in the process.

We do not want to tie ourselves ... to the United States, because she is unreliable ... and her statesmen do not know the mind of their own country.

There is a lot of juggling between NATO commitment and domestic politics in most countries [belonging to NATO.]

We had to avoid wounding Austria too severely; we had to avoid leaving behind in her any unnecessary bitterness of feeling or desire for revenge; we ought rather to reserve the possibility of becoming friends again with our adversary of the moment, and in any case to regard the Austrian state as a piece on the European chessboard and the renewal of friendly relations as a move open to us. If Austria were severely injured, she would become the ally of France and of every other opponent of ours; she would even sacrifice her anti-Russian interests for the sake of revenge on Prussia.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests

We do not need Pakistan to win our war in Afghanistan, but as long as we say that we do, the Pakistanis will play us like a bad fiddle.

Doesn't it seem awfully strange that the Iraqi government we support is an ally of the Iranians who are our declared enemies? Are we not now supporting the Iranians by propping up their allies in Iraq?

You should never make alliances with a decadent nation like France and a semi-barbarous nation like Russia

An economic version of mutual deterrence is preserving the uneasy status quo between China and Japan.

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.

We have long depended on an America which has got a clear sense of its stakes in the world and how much it depends on the world as well as how much the world and its allies and friends depend on the United States of America, and we hope this will continue.

Unless we get serious about addressing Iran's regional ambitions in places like Syria, then our allies are never going to be confident that we have a strategy for the region.