Matt Gonzalez Quotes

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I don’t think America wants democracies in the Middle East. They wouldn’t be nearly as friendly to us

Throughout history states have also used force to reform, restructure, or rebuild the domestic institutions of other countries

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.

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.”

Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.

I've never seen America as an imperialist or colonialist or meddling country.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

We will not allow other countries to use our soil as a battleground.

The next time some neocon, demanding whatever military intervention neocons are demanding that day, invokes Hitler or Munich or appeasement, lock up your silver.

U. S. foreign policy in the 20th century was characterized by disastrous oscillations between over-commitment and isolation

It’s not America’s job to fix the Middle East. Our job is to look after our own interests..

I do not accept the right of big powers to change governments as and when it affects their interests.

The U.S. has made a lot of mistakes all over the world... look at Iraq. The country that makes such mistakes do not have the moral right to teach the world.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.

We are not at war with Egypt. We are in an armed conflict.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

Foreign interventions always end badly.

I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.

We also can't try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That's not leadership; that's a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It's the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq - and we should have learned it by now.

We really need to stop the imperialist tendencies of countries like the United States and Great Britain.