Henry Rollins Quotes

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

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

Too often in Washington we tend to see foreign policy as an abstraction, with little understanding of what we are committing our country to: the complications and consequences of endeavors.

In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan.

Foreign policy will require a strategic agility that, whenever possible, gets ahead of problems, strengthens U.S. security and alliances, and promotes American interests and credibility.

If your government had given me a thousandth of the sum it spent to depose me, I could have won that war.

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

I've been arguing this for months. This is not our war. This is not a war we should be in. Australia's better spending its time negotiating with North Korea.

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.

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

Is a military solution the only way to stop nations from doing bad things?

The United States should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the Marines.

As a journalist, I have spent years reporting on often difficult and depressing conflicts, on poverty, and the inhuman way we sometimes treat each other.

The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.

We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America's friends from her enemies, and recognizes the true threats that we face.

We must use all the tools of American power in resolving disputes, including diplomacy. And we must have sufficient congressional debate and oversight before ever putting another U.S. solider in harm's way.

We have a model that we're following, and it's the Libya model.

War is murder. And the military preparations now being made for a potential major confrontation are aimed at collective murder. In a nuclear age the victims would be numbered by the millions. This naked truth must be faced.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

At every election, my vote goes to the candidate less likely to declare war. You're dropping hugely expensive pieces of exploding metal on a population. America deserves the president it gets, whether the country votes for them or allows their vote to be stolen, and the least we can do is to elect someone who won't do that to other people.

Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.

And, perhaps most importantly, regional conflicts will again and again confront us with a cruel choice between costly engagement and costly indifference.

It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.