Thomas Schelling Quotes

But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail.

Foreign policy works best when force and diplomacy are used together.

Soft power … cannot accomplish much in the absence of a willingness to use hard power.

In international affairs, you never threaten things you're not prepared to do.

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

Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes.

Power alone is respected and ... in order to gain peace, the United States has no alternative but to wield it

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.

Great powers engage.

The management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end.

We can pursue peaceful diplomacy with the Iranian regime while also continuing our maximum economic pressure campaign, while also defending ourselves... To say that it's a war with Iran or nothing is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how foreign policy actually works.

Both Bibi and Obama realize that they are going to have to face the problem of Iran together.

A great nation like the United States has many and varied interests, and we need both to do business with tyrants and to engage constantly in multilateral diplomacy.

We have treated our most serious adversaries, such as Iran and North Korea, in the most juvenile manner - by giving them the silent treatment. In so doing, we have weakened, not strengthened, our bargaining position and our leadership.

Diplomacy is not an end in itself if it does not advance U.S. interests.

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.

I told him that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words.

Turkey can be a bridge to regimes and actions the United States can't reach. Turkey can talk to people the United States can't talk to.

One of the things the United States does well is building coalitions. What the U.S. knows is that if you don't have a coalition with you, you will have a coalition against you. I don't want to see China and Russia on the side of Iran more strongly than they are.

Foreign policy is effectively the assertion of many individual countries intersecting on the global marketplace. And you have to figure out how to get your interest served in a way that meets the interests and needs of these other folks.

Colin Powell has said over the years that Saddam Hussein is like a toothache. It recurs from time to time, and you just have to live with it. At other times, he's compared Saddam Hussein to a kidney stone that will eventually pass. But he has never said, 'You have to operate and take out the kidney stone.'

This president failed so miserably in diplomacy that we are now forced to war.

Pat Roberts and I both feel very strongly that when we get to Iran, that we can't make the same mistakes. We have to ask the questions, the hard questions before, not afterwards, and get the right intelligence.

Foreign policy is about choosing from nasty options.

I don’t talk to countries that exhibit bad behavior.