Dick Cheney 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 don't think it's the job of the United States to build democracies from whole cloth. That's Wilsonianism to me of the most crazy kind.

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

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

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

The [foreign] policy of the United States is modeled on interventionism and aggression. It is logical that we should always be very suspicious.

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.

I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq.

The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age.

This notion that we're going to prop up foreign governments, that we're going to invade other countries for some kind of perceived benefit where we're going to install somebody who's going to be supportive of American interests or American corporate private interests needs to stop.

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

My goal in Baghdad was to facilitate a debate here in the United States on America's policy toward Iraq, a debate that's been sadly lacking.

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

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

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

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.

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.”

Preemption, democracy promoting and nation building have all been sullied by association by association with the War in Iraq.

We've gone too far in thinking we can re-create an American democratic paradise in the Middle East.

We have tried to change regimes through a variety of means - over 80 times, by some estimates. Many of these efforts were counterproductive to U.S. interests.

America does not need to continue to have regime change throughout the world, nation-building.

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.

The United States can't impose democracies. We can't impose our will. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan.

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.

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.