Yaroslav Trofimov Quotes

Working with Europeans is very difficult. They require endless respect.

The Foreign Office works hard to remind people of local laws and customs as often they can be very different to British law.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.

American officials have bent over backwards to show how sensitive they are to Muslim culture. It didn't seem very effective. They seem to be worried about winning the respect of other people.

Where I'm from, we don't do the kiss-on-the-cheek thing. Sometimes we can feel a bit awkward in England. Someone needs to let me know what the rules are because I don't want to be rude. I need a little more etiquette coaching.

I'm not Ang Lee who knows so much about western market and the taste of western audiences.

I have a great relationship with the Mexican people.

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

Multicultural markets are nuanced but not alien.

China is a company of contradictions. Nothing is what it appears to be. We have to be extremely respectful when we go overseas.

I understand different cultures because I have travelled a lot.

The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.

The difficulty that negotiators have is often based on the cultural difference that various countries have.

The fact that our largest presence in the world is our massive military is going to dictate how we engage with the world.

We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.

... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding of that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.

[Barack] Obama has betrayed Israel, gutted the military, and apologized on ten world tours.

I would say that I have been consistent in my broad view of how American power should be deployed, and the view that we underestimate our power when we restrict it to just our military power. We shortchange our influence and our ability to shape events when that's the only tool we think we have in the toolbox.

In the whole history of this country, we have probably won more friends from the power of our example than from the power of our military.

It is a major world power, and today it is an economic and military leader - no doubt about it. That is why America has a strong influence on the situation in the world in general.

Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs 'caelum non animum mutant': they see new meridians, but the same men, and with heads as empty as their pockets.

Culturally, one of the best arguments we can make is, wait and see.

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.