William Hague Quotes

World politics is not a kindergarten.

The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

We always make the mistake in the United States of America in Democratic or Republican administrations alike is we tend to embrace the despot that's least troublesome to us. That should not be the way we view things.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

The United Nations Security Council is there to protect the interest of the Americans and the British.

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

The American nation cannot reach across the planet and pick the leadership of other countries.

All foreign policy is the intervention of one nation's domestic politics into another nation's domestic politics.

It’s not a dictatorship in the United States. But it is dictatorial to the rest of the world. Who’s going to say no?

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

Between countries -- regardless of whether they are democratic or authoritarian -- there will need to be an explanation, either for publics or for powerful constituencies

The very nature of executive decisions as to foreign policy is political, not judicial.

A multipolar world means more compromise [on Human Rights violations]… more back-scratching and less principled denunciation.

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

No country can decide for another county.

Stability is a reasonable foreign policy goal, but not at the expense of human rights.

People think that it only takes an American decision to solve this or that problem [in foreign affairs].

At the U.N., I routinely encounter countries that do not want to impose sanctions or even to enforce those already on the books. The hard-line sanctions skeptics have their own self-interested reasons for opposing sanctions, but they ground their opposition in claims that America uses sanctions to inflict punishment for punishment's sake.

Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.

The notion that the U.S. can impose its will unilaterally on the World Bank reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about how multilateral organizations should work.

There is always an element of realpolitik that has to be present in the conduct of any nation's national security affairs. At the same time, we have to also have a balance between realpolitik and Wilsonian principles of freedom and democracy and human rights. And maintaining that balance is the greatest challenge that we in the West, including the Federal Republic of Germany, have to face because it's many times a very difficult decision-making process.

Would it not be worthwhile to pause a moment before we commit ourselves to war at the pleasure of other nations in whose councils we shall have but one vote?

It is the President alone who must make the major decisions of our foreign policy.

American foreign policy must be fashioned by the United States, not the United Nations.