Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 'humanitarian intervention,' to use the currently fashionable phrase.

So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.

I don’t like genocide, but I would not commit our troops [to stop it.]

We do not have the God-given right to intervene in any country in which we feel like intervening.

If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know, that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.

The question of when you intervene is probably the toughest question of American foreign policy.

… the financial cost of a [military] strike isn’t a reason to acquiesce in mass murder in Syria.

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

Preemption, democracy promoting and nation building have all been sullied by association by association with the War in Iraq.

There is every prospect that events arising out of our growing foreign investment will present us in the future with decisions involving war and peace, will bring us, whether we like it or not, to concern ourselves with distant causes.

I'm not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo.

I did not support the U.S. decision to intervene with military force in Libya. The evidence was not persuasive that a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent. Policies other than military intervention were never given a full chance.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

First, we could have defied both of them and could have gone to war against both of these nations for this violation of international law and interference with our neutral rights.

Taking a principled and consistent stance over Iraq has attracted much criticism from our detractors and opponents.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.

Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.

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.

I think no one knows what humanitarian intervention means. If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

I think it's appropriate for the international community in situations like this to intervene in Kosovo. I am in favor of an intervention. On some level, you have to say that at least somebody is doing something.