Diplomatic Failures Quotes

On whatever side we regard the history of Europe, we shall perceive it to be a tissue of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, of politics without design, and wars without consequence.

Try to name any meaningful thing Hillary Clinton accomplished in her role as Secretary of State. The small things she did accomplish have almost universally turned out badly.

Patched-up diplomatic solutions designed to answer the needs of the moment rarely last, and as they unravel they can actually make things worse.

You will see Fidel Castro selling stocks for Morgan Stanley before you will see Yasser Arafat sign a peace treaty.

The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale.

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

It is fortunate that diplomats have long noses since they usually cannot see beyond them.

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail... You can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

At times we expected the allies unquestioningly to follow our leads; sometimes we failed to consult them in advance before reversing policies; at other times we ignored their requests.

No secretary of state has been more wrong more often and in more places that Hillary Clinton. Her decision spread death, destruction, and terrorism everywhere she touched.

Our State Department is often wrong and timid.

In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided.

I am shocked that we seemed to have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from Vietnam.