Wesley Clark Quotes

The Republican Party is the party of national security. There's hardly a national security wing of the Democratic Party anymore. So if we turn away from it, that'll be a big problem.

Republicans always try to paint Democrats as weak on defense. This time, they can't. After all, Mitt Romney's idea of an overseas accomplishment is sending U.S. jobs there.

For 50 years, the Republicans have been accusing the Democrats of being soft on national security.

The Democrats just don't have a foreign policy that they're willing to defend, that they're willing to use to take down the president's. We're dealing with the power of suggestion here.

Bipartisanship is like marriage. It takes two to make it work. It only takes one to make it a failure. The President has been playing politics with foreign policy.

Most Republicans have lined up behind the Trump foreign policy agenda, while Democrats lack a cohesive, unifying message or guiding philosophy on where they would lead the country internationally if in power.

Now Republicans are a more interventionist party than they have been at any time since George W. Bush left office.

On the issue of Iraq, it is my hope, and my challenge to my colleagues, that our debate will be based on what is best for the future of our nation and for Iraq, not what's best for a political party or presidential campaign.

I think that you have a situation where one political party, in specific, if you watched the Republican debate, it's all about terrorism.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

The principal role of the President of the United States is the security of the country and participating in trying to stabilize the world.

We have to defend America and be strong.

Bush the Elder's stature as president grows with every passing year. He was the finest foreign policy president I've ever covered and a man who defied his party on tax increases while imposing budget restrictions on the Democrats.

There's nothing wrong with being a Conservative and coming up with a Conservative believe in foreign policy where we have a strong national defense and we don't go to war so carelessly.

It's one thing to earnestly try but fail to bring the two sides together. Though Democrats will deny it, that was the case with George W. Bush.

The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and around him, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less hostile since Congress first sat.

The Defense Department has a great deal of influence on foreign policy, and State has very little impact on defense policy.

The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene. It is up to the civilians to tell us what they want to do and we’ll figure out how to do it.

Foreign policy is always a sticking point between Congress and the executive.

The Republicans would like to be the co-pilots in the foreign policy take-offs as well as in the crash landings.

There’s a minimum threshold any man or woman has to cross on national security and foreign policy for the American people to think you’re remotely eligible to be president and these guys have a long way to go.

In politics, reality is that which is unseen. Politics is the art of combining a nation’s diverse or opposing factors to the benefit of its domestic well-being, and of saving the country from the open enmity or covetous friendship of other nations.

‘National Security’ is, in effect, a translation of the European concept of ‘raison d’etat’, providing cover for a government that felt free to break through all traditional limits on its power.

Moscow believes that using force constitutes strategic defense.

There is only one Republican presidential candidate that has a proven, courageous, and conservative record on national security: Marco Rubio.