Foreign Policy Decisions Quotes

President Obama continues to support war. He continues to remove many basic civil liberties and human rights. He continues to condone drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan that kill women and children. He meets with his advisers every Tuesday morning and signs extrajudicial killings. To me, those are not the actions of a peace person.

I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five, six years.

On the foreign policy front, Barack Obama is not a confrontational man. He stayed away from all confrontations, and you can look and see what happened overseas. It's a mess everywhere. So he made major mistakes, major policy mistakes. Those mistakes are not going to be forgiven by history.

Okay, NATO expanded to East Berlin and East Germany. Under [Bill] Clinton NATO expanded further, to the former Russian satellites. In 2008 NATO formally made an offer to Ukraine to join NATO. That's unbelievable. I mean, Ukraine is the geopolitical heartland of Russian concern, quite aside from historical connections, population and so on.

The President said that Gold told him to invade Iraq. You see that's what happens when you mix New Testament and Old Milwaukee.

President Bush says he is looking forward to the testimony of Condoleezza Rice. Yes, he is very excited about Condoleezza Rice's testimony before Congress. Well, it makes perfect sense - he wants to know what was going on, too.

In 2003, Congress should have resisted the rush to a war of choice with Iraq. I will do everything in my power to prevent us from repeating the mistakes of my predecessors.

Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse. ... I find Obama scary in a way that I had not done in 2008.

Nixon at one point informs Kissinger . . . that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves . . . genocide.

In any case, it is better to have some deal than no deal, but it's interesting that Obama picked the day of implementing of Iran deal to impose new sanctions on North Korea.

Soviet foreign ministers would come in to see the president all the time, routinely. Jimmy Carter stopped that after the invasion of Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan resumed it in 1984, I think. And so the fact of a meeting like that I think is not that big a deal.

In accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the issues of foreign policy and defense are fully in the hands of the president.

President Obama has thrown allies like Israel under the bus, even as he has relaxed sanctions on Castro's Cuba. He abandoned our friends in Poland by walking away from our missile defense commitments, but is eager to give Russia's President Putin the flexibility he desires, after the election. Under my administration, our friends will see more loyalty, and Mr. Putin will see a little less flexibility and more backbone.

Presidents are afraid to lose wars. They're afraid to be outflanked on the right by the militarists. They don't want to be seen as soft on either communism or soft on terrorism or whatever. So presidents are constantly tugged away from their domestic commitments to foreign policy.

America is constantly involved in unnecessary wars.

As regards Hillary C;inton's foreign policy actions and the powerful vested interests she seems gleefully beholden to, including all the biggest players in the military-industrial complex, I feel that she would be no better an actor on the world stage than Trump and whatever coalition of managers he might cobble together.

After 9-11, the President had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead, by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests, President Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them! (14th February 1945)

There's more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we've published, just about Libya. It's not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of [Muammar] Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state - something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.

Hillary Clinton has made bad judgment not only on taxes. She's made bad judgments on Libya, on Syria, on Iraq. I mean, her and Obama, whether you like it or not, the way they got out of Iraq, the vacuum they've left, that's why ISIS formed in the first place. They started from that little area, and now they're in 32 different nations, Hillary. Congratulations. Great job.

As part of that negotiation [with China], as part of fulfilling that promise, all of these issues are on the table. But at the same time, Rex Tillerson is correct, there's no predetermined path here. But it's something that is going to be discussed and decided down the road.

I believe that this president [George W. Bush], regrettably, rushed us into a war, made decisions about foreign policy, pushed alliances away. And, as a result, America is now bearing this extraordinary burden where we are not as safe as we ought to be.

Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

What in the world had Grover Cleveland done? Will you tell me? You give it up? I have been looking for six weeks for a Democrat who could tell me what Cleveland has done for the good of his country and for the benefit of the people, but I have not found him.... He says himself...that two-thirds of his time has been uselessly spent with Democrats who want office.... Now he has been so occupied in that way that he has not done anything else.

Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they're just like a schoolboy with a new girl.