Mohammed Aldouri Quotes

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

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?

Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.

In international relations, in foreign policy, a great deal has to do with historical circumstances, a great deal has to do with the sense and perception of people.

NATO believes it can pick on a small nation and force us to surrender our independence. And that is where NATO miscalculated. You are not willing to sacrifice lives to achieve our surrender. But we are willing to die to defend our rights as an independent sovereign nation.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.

Great powers reserve the right to police bad actors in their neighborhoods.

If there is one great power, and the great power has taken upon itself the right to preempt and is choosing for itself when and in what circumstances it's going to do that, obviously it leads people in the rest of the world to wonder how far this doctrine extends.

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

The United States can't go in and impose order on chaos every place in the world.

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

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

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

There are both things in international law: the principle of territorial integrity and right to self-determination.

We've made some mistakes in this country in times past - the Korean conflict proceeding that, some say proceeding the Persian Gulf War, where we were ambiguous as to what we would do.

There are nearly 200 countries and a population of over 6 billion in today's world. International affairs should be addressed by all countries through consultations rather than monopolised by a few powers.

As soon as one nation claims the right to take preventive action, other countries will naturally do the same. If we go down that road, where are we going?

First, we could have defied both of them and could have gone to war against both of these nations for this violation of international law and interference with our neutral rights.

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.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.

The history of nations shows that words are not always immediately followed by action.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.

We have no quarrel with America. We all know NATO is the strongest military machine in the world. We simply want them to stop being so busy with our country and worry about their own problems.