Foreign Policy Strategy Quotes

Maybe Hillary Clinton was right in 2008 when she called Barack Obama 'naive' on foreign policy.

The question of when you intervene is probably the toughest question of American foreign policy.

The media should probe and challenge candidates to help voters understand their views on foreign policy. Questions should include, 'What lessons have you learned from past foreign policy decisions? How will they shape your vision as commander in chief? What is America's role in the world?'

The 21st Century should be India's century but from 2004 to 2014 bad ideas and bad actions have affected the country adversely. Every day was a new bad day and there were new scandals. People were furious.

Well, I think the U.S. has been careful not to go too far in attacking Iran's allies, in particular in attacking Hezbollah forces in Syria, which have been propping up the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

The authority and influence of France on the world scene in the 21st century will not depend solely on its modernity and cohesion, nor even on the continuity and professionalism of its foreign policy. France will be heeded if it has a message to convey. Faced with the temptations of laissez-faire, France must stand out as the nation with the imagination and determination to pursue an ambition that combines cogency with generosity.

What I've said is we're going to encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our nonmilitary aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.

In a reality, what we should be doing is having quiet diplomacy with the Russians to convince them that it's in their self-interest to have a more stable Middle East because trade enriches us all.

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

It was interesting watching the Afghanistan war review deliberations, this three-month process where Barack Obama did the most thorough foreign policy review ever by a modern American president. Compare that to Libya. For a month he said we weren't going to do anything, then suddenly changed his mind and did it on the fly. My view is that it's not how long or quick you take to make a decision, it's whether you make the right one.

Ronald Reagan was one of our great foreign policy Presidents. He did not come from the Senate. He did not come from the foreign policy world. He was a governor, but his resolve, his clarity of purpose, his intelligence, his capacity to deal with complex issues and solve tough problems served him extremely well, and if I were elected President, I hope I could rely upon those same qualities.

There are some people who think that at some time in the future, China may challenge us for supremacy in the Pacific, and therefore, what do we do today to prevent that? And you, of course, will say that we will try to thwart any economic progress in China. If we engaged in such a policy, we would turn a billion-plus people into nationalist opponents of the United States.

I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as "kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But of course it doesn't put it like that. It talks of "low intensity conflict..." What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies.

Mike Pence came out and said this was a courtesy call, then Donald Trump a few hours later went on Twitter, as is his wont, and essentially linked the call to Taiwan with a whole series of things he doesn't like about Chinese economic and foreign policies and implied that the U.S. views of the status of Taiwan are now up for negotiation, that he wants them to be part of a broader negotiation with China about a whole series of economic and foreign policy issues. So, we just don't really know what exactly they're planing to do with this.

I travel a lot on foreign policy, as you know. I'm in Europe a lot. I travelled over a million miles as vice president. They didn't do stimulus. Look where they are. Come on. I mean, this is like, I just get so frustrated. Like come on.

When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it could shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.

Our country today is at a stage in our foreign policy similar to that crucial point in our nation's early history when our Constitution was produced in Philadelphia.

Tensions plagued his [Woodrow Wilson’s] presidency--particularly the one between principal and pragmatism in United States foreign policy. This is perpetual and the defies resolution.

The United States doesn't have the will to work against al-Nusra or even ISIS, because they believe that this is a card they can use for their own agenda. If they attack al-Nusra or ISIS, they will lose a very important card regarding the situation in Syria.

The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe; which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable.

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

The Obama administration kind of shows how you can use diplomacy to bring the most important countries together and get the whole world on board.

When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.

Congress cannot—nor should it—run foreign policy on a day-to-day basis. That is a truism.