Foreign Policy Analysis Quotes

...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.

You don't have to keep looking at the future foreign policy in terms, simply, of the past.

And I think the only way you're going to improve US foreign policy and set a sound course for the future is if you're willing to look back at what went wrong before.

If you were following the [Barack] Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. So I think you can't properly understand Hillary Clinton's foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia.

In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.

The foreign policy, you have to know how to pick and choose. There's no way, if Saddam [Hussein] had not had weapons of mass destruction, I would have gone, because I don't believe that the U.S. should be involved directly in civil wars.

In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.

U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.

I think one of the critiques of me is that I thought I knew it all. But I was learning from the enormous resources available within the U.S. government who have a very different view of the world than many of the people commenting on foreign policy from outside of the government.

A number of foreign policy experts distanced themselves from Donald Trump, not Michael Flynn.

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity.

Do not read 'Hard Choices' if you seek a nuanced analysis of the people who run the world's foreign policy, let alone any juicy gossip.

I think Barack Obama's foreign policy will be regarded more failure than success.

It's naive and even irresponsible for a grownup today to get her or his information about foreign policy and war and peace exclusively from the administration in power. It's essential to have other sources of information, to check those against one's own common sense, and to form your own judgment as to whether we ought to go to or persist in war.

If I were to look at foreign policy, I would say John McCain has been wrong on just about everything over the last four decades.