Andrew Bonar Law Quotes

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations... It brings us into very dangerous territory and it could be used and abused by any other country. We need to continue to base our security on multilateralism, and on the Security Council.

U.S. society doesn't want to play the role of international policeman.

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

America cannot be the world's policeman. But we must reject the new isolationism that says: don't help anywhere, because we cannot help everywhere.

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

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

The United States can't be sheriff of the whole world.

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.

The American Left complains that we have no right to be the world's police force. On the contrary. We've been the world's janitor for almost a century, and after September 11, it became obvious it's better, safer, and more productive to change things instead of cleaning up after the mess.

Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world.

Give me the whole world to run and then I'll be happy. If tomorrow I was told I had to sort out the whole world's problems I'd sleep like a baby.

It is difficult for the strongest advocate of national rights to assert that the people in actual occupation or political control over a given area of the earth are entitled to do what they will with "their own," entirely disregarding the direct and indirect consequences of their actions upon the rest of the world.

The consequence is that what is called "the Law of Nations" is a savage code. The world will never be civilized until there is an international court. Savages begin to be civilized when they submit their difficulties to their peers. Nations will become civilized when they submit their difficulties to a great court, the judgments of which can be carried out, all nations pledging the cooperation of their armies and their navies for that purpose

The Newly established United Nations must be a force for action and not merely a frothing of words.

We must have a world organization for the purpose of deliberation, but not for the purpose of waging wars and imposing sanctions.

When our vital interests are challenged, or the will and conscience of the international community is defied, we will act; with peaceful diplomacy whenever possible, with force when necessary.

…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.

U.S. academics and Upper East Side New Yorkers like to think of the United Nations as a place where foreign ambassadors have intellectual discussions about power and world peace.

I know that sometimes we, as Americans, we reach outside of our means, and every once in a while we like to 'police the world,' but I think we do a lot of good as well.

That's the problem with the American position; they think that they are the police of the world.

The United Nations is actually a mid-20th century institution and much weaker than it was when it was originally created, because governments themselves are less capable of implementing the kind of promises or programs that they have put forward.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

The U.N. is one of many competitors in a marketplace of global problem solving.

I think that although we say we don't want to be the policeman of the world and et cetera, when 911 is dialed, it's the United States that has to answer the call.

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.