Barack Obama Quotes

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.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

I think we need to just be very clear about what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we're not trying to create the perfect democracy. We're never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.

When the commander-in-chief sends Americans to fight and die, it should be only to protect our vital national interests, not for his own personal, political gain.

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

The British can not alone act as the policemen of the world.

There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies.... in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it.

This is not going to be decided by public opinion polls. It is a national security issue.

Governments interfere in the affairs of each other, when they conceive their own peace is endangered.

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

Public diplomacy, practiced in harmony with traditional diplomacy, will enable us to advance our interest, to protect our security, and to continue to provide the moral basis for our leadership in the world.

Contributing to the maintenance of peace by making clear its determination to exercise the right of individual or collective self-defense … should any armed attack occur affecting its national security.

At times, the politicians or pundits might admit that Americans have no tangible interests in a given country, just a moral obligation to prevent killing, poverty or oppression. That’d be fine. At least they’d be making the case honestly.

It is just as important to define the limit beyond which we will not intervene as it is to convince our people that we cannot find security in an isolationist party.

U.S. foreign aid must be used more strategically to achieve our national security goals.

No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area.

This nation's elected leaders owe all Americans the duty of formulating an Iraqi policy based on sound analysis of the actual facts.

What our men and women in uniform are doing is providing for the Iraqi people and other surrounding nations the opportunity to see, to taste and to experience the democracy that equals freedom and ultimately justice.

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.

And when we draw lines in the sand with regard to certain basic things that are vital to our interest and to the interest of democracy and our friends around the world, we have to be willing to back that up.

Some in my party threaten to send a message that they don't know a just war when they see it, and more broadly that they're not prepared to use our military strength to protect our security and the cause of freedom.

The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.

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

I believe sincerely that we should bring in U.N. peacekeepers and bring our troops home.

It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq.