Donald Trump Quotes

Successful diplomats must always be conscious of other parties' need to know how an agreement serves their interests and how it can be sold back home.

Indeed, in foreign policymaking, inconsistency is often a virtue. I speak not of principles but of policy.

Every foreign policy of every major nation involves reason, common sense, carrots and sticks. You can't have all carrots and no sticks.

I know how to move between political camps. When everyone in the world hated (Libyan leader Moammar) Gadhafi, I paid him an official visit. It caused an uproar - Lula's visiting the devil!

It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.

I started, you know, to work as a diplomat during the Soviet days, and in spite of ideology being very high on the Communist Party agenda, I can assure you that in practical terms, we have always been trying to be pragmatic.

Richard Holbrooke is known for many things, but I will remember him as an impressive, sometimes even intimidating diplomat who understood the value of culture in diplomacy.

And we ought to work our diplomacy first and I think it's a reason it's going to respond increasingly to our diplomacy particularly with the president's direct involvement in the peace process, and I think that's extraordinarily important.

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.

The way you change foreign policy is by raising the domestic political cost of the policy.

Diplomacy and force are two sides of the same coin.

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

Diplomacy is tough, slogging, slow work—and hard work.

We have normal relations with lots of countries whose leadership we do not like..

There is an increasing demand that the president and Secretary Hull get rid of the unteachable group in the State Department of men who have not learned, after ten years of experience, that appeasement has never worked anywhere, at any time.

Diplomacy and coalition-building are hard work and not easy for any president.

People can be sensitive, so if I need to, I'll suck it up and be more flowery. I'll do what it takes to get the outcome I want. As I like to say, sometimes you have to crouch to conquer.

No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals

We did drive them [Iran] to the negotiating table. And my successor, John Kerry, and President [Barack] Obama got a deal that put a lid on Iran's nuclear program without firing a single shot. That's diplomacy. That's coalition-building. That's working with other nations.

Richard Nixon even before becoming president, before meeting Henry Kissinger, he said, "This is ridiculous. Communism is nationalist. The Chinese and Russian and Yugoslav and Cuban and - none of these communists get along, and the Koreans and the Vietnamese, and we can do business with them." And then he opened up to China, and that's when the Cold War started.

We are ready to deal with any President [of U.S], but of course, and I mentioned that, it depends on the readiness of the future Administration.

I think we can't be naive in dealing with the Russians or dealing with the Syrians. But at the same time, I think we could try to encourage - and I think this is what diplomacy should do - encourage the self-interests of all parties to believe that it is in their best interest to get evil actors or rogue actors such as Syria or Iran, if you try to have less belligerent and less bellicose behavior.

If anything good is going to emerge out of this, it's going to be the result of an acceptable modus vivendi between Ukraine and Russia. The two of them will have to get together at some point. It is going to be a result that many people in the West will not like, because Russia, as the bigger power, is going to get the better of the deal. So, a lot of people will say, that's appeasement. That's this - that - it's reality.

I didn't say I would cut off all communication with [Vladimir] Putin. What I said was as president of the United States, now is not the time to talk with him.

Take a look at the way that Trump has described some of the foreign countries that we deal with - some that are allies and some that are not. China is one example. He said they were currency manipulators, but after he sat down with President Xi and had a piece of chocolate cake, he then said they were no longer currency manipulators.