Donald Sassoon Quotes

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

In a climate where much of foreign policy is a direct function of domestic politics, focusing on what one doesn't want is an easy way out of difficult conundrums for many world leaders. Expressing what one does want requires more courage.

The foreign policy, you have to know how to pick and choose. There's no way, if Saddam [Hussein] had not had weapons of mass destruction, I would have gone, because I don't believe that the U.S. should be involved directly in civil wars.

The important thing is that we recognize our President's leadership, that he is not saying: I am going to walk away from this. He is saying: I am going to do the right thing.

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.

Foreign policy is about choosing from nasty options.

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

World politics is not a kindergarten.

Ninety percent of foreign policy is reacting to whatever's happening out there.

Foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

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

I don’t think that we should ever apply our military power unilaterally…. If we cannot persuade like-minded, friendly nations of the wisdom of our policy, then maybe we should rethink the policy.

U. S. Foreign Policy is usually largely reactive.

I would never seek foreign conflicts just to distract attention from domestic difficulties; that would be frivolous.

No world power has ever tried to manage affair in this particular circumstance: The cycle of News, the cycle of crises, the complexity of grievances in increasing numbers of failed and failing states.

Political considerations can be taken into account only as long as they do not make demands that are militarily improper or impossible.

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

America is a world leader, but we should not be its policeman or ATM.

I work with the president and speak with him multiple times a week. This is a man, he didn't become the president by accident. And as much as everyone wants to talk about stability, was he unstable when he passed the tax reform? Was he unstable when we finally hit back at Syria and said no more chemical weapons?

Ultimately, when you have to deal with a whole country, priorities change.

Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems.

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

In foreign policy you have to wait twenty-five years to see how it comes out.

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.