Michael Spence Quotes

The United States has got to adopt a policy of befriending and creating allies around the world.

Multilateralism may be little more than a polite way of camouflaging what is in practice unilateralism with allies.

You can’t go it alone even if you are the world’s only superpower.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests

The costly unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency led to a decade of war in the Middle East and the derailment of American foreign policy at large.

It's not just Iraq - it's the Atlantic partnership which is at stake.

Obama's foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront.

What President Bush did in his doctrine of preemptive strike and in his war in Afghanistan and in Iraq was to turn even his allies in Europe negatively toward America.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

Turkey has worked alongside its allies from the beginning.

When we see a lack of leadership coming from the White House, that's what brings leaders in Turkey to attack Israel the way they do. When we see a lack of leadership coming from the White House, that's why we see the leader of Iran... continuing to build the nuclear reactors.

As the United States shapes and carries out its policies toward Muslim countries, it should do so with Turkey at its side.

Secretary Clinton has dramatically changed the face of U.S. foreign policy globally for the good. But I wish she had been unleashed more by the White House.

As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president goes to Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms of course.

Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.

I met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, visited our allies in the Arab Gulf, traveled to Tunisia and Iraq, met with President Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, and visited our allies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

Alliances and international organizations should be understood as opportunities for leadership and a means to expand our influence, not as constraints on our power.

One of the things the United States does well is building coalitions. What the U.S. knows is that if you don't have a coalition with you, you will have a coalition against you. I don't want to see China and Russia on the side of Iran more strongly than they are.

It is vital that the United States maintains open lines of communication with our allies. We must assure them of our commitment to eradicating global terrorism wherever it may reside or wherever it's given haven.

President Obama's consistent agenda has been to weaken the United States and our allies in pursuit of a more 'balanced' global power structure.

In fact, it struck me when we invaded last year that if we did it without European and East Asian support, we were risking losing our alliance in Europe in exchange for Iraq, and that is a very undesirable exchange.

Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took.

It's dismaying to see the unilateralism that the government is doing.

The real danger to Britain is a foreign policy that is isolationist in Europe and therefore weak in the rest of the world.

Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.