Michael T. Flynn Quotes

[Donald Trump] actually advocated for the actions we took in Libya and urged that [Muamar] Gadhafi be taken out, after actually doing some business with him one time.

I have nothing but contempt for Gadhafi. I'm not a Gadhafi supporter in any way. However, it's not clear to me that it's a vital and compelling national security objective of the United States that we ought to use military force to remove him from power. He's not the only unpleasant and unsavory dictator in the world.

From the very beginning, the American republic has never shrunk from foreign wars …. There has scarcely been a year since its founding that American soldiers haven’t been overseas … American foreign policy largely consists of doctrines about when and where to intervene in other people’s countries.

President-elect Donald Trump has a host of national security challenges to deal with as he assumes office, from the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the grinding Syrian civil war to the flexing of Russian muscles under President Vladimir Putin to how to deal with ISIS as the terrorist army retreats in Iraq.

The president has largely taken a hands-off approach in Syria and granted it as a legitimate sphere of interest to countries like Iran and like Russia. This is very bad policy, and it's going to lead to very dangerous consequences for our partners in the region, which is why so many of them are so opposed to U.S. policies.

Obama's decision to leave, to not sustain the victory that resulted after eight years of fighting, from 2003 to 2011 in Iraq, was another incredibly stupid decision. It was totally based on politics, not based on any notion of national security. It's a nightmare for our national security. And then you have the Libya intervention.

Our safety at home and the cause of freedom abroad is largely contingent upon our success in Iraq.

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

I don't think that the war serves U.S. interests. I think Osama bin Laden's interests and the Iranian interests are very much served by it, and it's becoming a huge drain on our resources both material and political.

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.

It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

I think the Iraq War is not particularly tailored to American interests.

It's alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.

It kind of scares me, the notion that we're going to be injecting ourselves into other countries' affairs when they're not posing a threat to our security. I wouldn't be telling Israel what to do.

I certainly am not willing to involve the country in a foreign war for the object of acquiring Texas.

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

By invading Iraq, the President has undermined the War on Terrorism.

It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.

The United States is proud of her remoteness from the old world, her freedom from entanglement in its quarrels, her isolation. Yet in her relatively very short history as an independent state she has fought at least six foreign wars while her troops have landed on foreign soil on nearly a hundred occasions. Not one of those wars was for the purpose of defending American soil.

…The invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy mistake in American history. We invaded a country that was no threat to us…. We have lost so much of our world prestige and world leadership.

We have no vital national interest in Syria's civil war.

Unless we get serious about addressing Iran's regional ambitions in places like Syria, then our allies are never going to be confident that we have a strategy for the region.

It's - getting Assad out is not the only priority. And so what we're trying to do is obviously defeat ISIS.