Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

The historical ambivalence of the United States toward global engagement is a thread that runs through American history.

Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.

There will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, balances of power ...

President Nixon was a pragmatic strategist. He would engage, not contain, China, but he would also quietly set pieces into place for a fallback position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive.

For the Kremlin, it is more feasible to preserve its great-power status in cooperation with the United States than in confrontation.

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

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

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.

It is clearly unwise for us to continue the attempt to carry alone, or largely single-handed, the opposition to Soviet expansion. It is urgently necessary for us to restore something of the balance of power in Europe and Asia by strengthening local forces of independence and by getting them to assume part of our burden.

Our use of the United Nations as an instrument for opposing Soviet expansion. prior to the conclusion of peace, has strained that institution severely. It has an increasing tendency to alarm smaller nations and to paralyze, rather than stimulate, their will to play an active part in the organization

Great powers engage.

The policy of freedom for Eastern Europe was for domestic purposes only for an America that did not want to face its limited power in the world.

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

For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent …

Perhaps we have already intervened too much in the affairs of other peoples.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

Promoting democracy is one goal of U. S. foreign policy dating back at least 100 years. But it has always been one goal of many, often negated and outweighed by other competing interests.

America would never consent to become entangled in European diplomacy…

We have no constitutional authority to police the world or involve ourselves in nation building, in making the world safe for our style of democracy. Our founders advised against it and the early presidents followed that advice.

That's the problem with Russia: The world has changed. Europe is not at war, and no one wants to negotiate with us. The world has changed, but Russia prefers to pretend it has not.

… this whole Near East problem is not just an Arab-Israeli dispute but a problem of the influence of the West as opposed to that of the Soviet. We want no wars, but we do not want a Sovietized world.

I believe some of the tensions the U.S. has had with Russia and that the Europeans have had with Russia... China is taking advantage of some of those dealings.

America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia.

We won the Cold War because we showed nuclear vigilance and diligence.