Top 66 Quotes About American Foreign Policy
#1. Maintaining the balance of power should be as fundamental to American foreign policy as the Bill of Rights is to domestic policy.
George Friedman
#2. The great divide in American foreign policy thinking is between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power.
Charles Krauthammer
#3. Al Qaeda's central political objective is the creation of an Islamic republic, not the progressive realignment of American foreign policy.
Simon Cottee
#4. American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.
Tom DeLay
#5. I am ... willing to make it clear that American foreign policy must uphold the sanctity of international treaties. That is the cornerstone on which all relations between nations must rest.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#6. My job is to try to advance American foreign policy, to try to advance the president's agenda on democracy and human rights.
Condoleezza Rice
#7. The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#8. American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Charles Stanley
#9. American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.
Michael Mandelbaum
#10. American foreign policy must be more than the management of crisis. It must have a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.
George W. Bush
#11. The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.
John Lewis Gaddis
#12. I'm a Muslim, we come from a Muslim community and we are very critical of western or American foreign policy. So if I've got the right and if other Muslims have got the right to criticize ... likewise everyone else has also got the right to criticize everything else.
Maajid Nawaz
#13. First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.
Michael Mandelbaum
#14. The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.
Henry A. Kissinger
#15. American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.
Russell Baker
#16. I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.
Madeleine Albright
#18. The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy.
Aaron McGruder
#19. I think that American presidents, that position in itself, as well as American foreign policy, it has terrorism in it. CIA agents going to overthrow certain governments - they're using terrorist tactics. They're not going in there like, 'Hey, you wanna have some cake?'
Lupe Fiasco
#20. I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.
Joe Biden
#21. There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense.
Barney Frank
#22. The reason I made women's issues central to American foreign policy, was not because I was a feminist, but because we know that societies are more stable if women are politically and economically empowered.
Madeleine Albright
#23. Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.
Michael Mandelbaum
#24. I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.
Samantha Power
#25. America is a unique place. The value part of American foreign policy is something I think is very laudable, but it is uniquely American. And it is part of what makes America special.
Michael Oren
#26. I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.
Eugene Jarecki
#27. Well, human security is a concept that I am very committed to enshrining in American foreign policy.
Hillary Clinton
#28. Graham Greene, as I understand it, was quite outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy.
Brendan Fraser
#29. I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
#30. One of the many, many salutary aspects of Barack Obama's impending presidential nomination is the sea change his victory marks in the battle for the mind-set of the American foreign policy establishment.
Eric Alterman
#31. American foreign policy has been - and must continue to be - based on unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist and to be free from terror.
Howard Berman
#32. The National Security Council's real role is to coordinate the various activities of the government of the United States in the furtherance of American foreign policy.
Oliver North
#33. We need American foreign policy that tells the world very clearly that it is bad to be our enemy and good to be our friend.
Marco Rubio
#34. Maybe you didn't understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn't matter. You held up your hand and said, "I'm willing to die for these worthless civilians.
Phil Klay
#35. I'm sorry that I can't snap my fingers and undo 50 years of bad American foreign policy.
Harry Browne
#36. The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.
P. J. O'Rourke
#37. Words summarize the American philosophy of life: Live and let live; Let's make a deal. 8 words summarize American foreign policy: We're better than you; Do it our way.
Gary North
#38. Many Americans, and many more people around the world, have been outraged by what they see as President George W. Bush's radical reordering of American foreign policy.
Stephen Kinzer
#39. The principles that should guide American foreign policy are simple: the world is safer when America leads, only strength ensures peace and freedom, and America must stand with its allies and challenge its adversaries.
Kevin McCarthy
#40. If America was trying to keep the bubonic plague out of its hemisphere, Canadians would import it just to show their independence of American foreign policy.
Barbara Amiel
#41. I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.
Henry A. Kissinger
#42. Everyone in the Middle East pretty much wants to come and be an American citizen, but pretty much everybody is angry with the U. S. foreign policy.
Mohamed ElBaradei
#43. The only way to Cuba is with the CIA.
Phil Ochs
#44. Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa ... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.
Harry Belafonte
#45. American strategic [nuclear] forces do not exist solely for the purpose of deterring a Soviet nuclear threat or attack against the U.S. itself. Instead, they are intended to support U.S. foreign policy.
Colin S. Gray
#46. No foreign policy can be sustained in the United States of America without the informed consent of the American people. And informed means just that, successes and failure, a realistic assessment of where we are and what the president plans to do about it.
Joe Biden
#47. Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.
Michael Parenti
#48. Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck.
Richard Just
#49. With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.
Michael Johns
#50. Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He's pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the proposition that this too will be the American century.
John Podhoretz
#51. Foreign policy will require a strategic agility that, whenever possible, gets ahead of problems, strengthens U.S. security and alliances, and promotes American interests and credibility.
Chuck Hagel
#52. President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president - his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins.
Ben Shapiro
#53. How did we win the election in the year 2000? We talked about a humble foreign policy: No nation-building; don't police the world. That's conservative, it's Republican, it's pro-American - it follows the founding fathers. And, besides, it follows the Constitution.
Ron Paul
#54. You are, I am sure, aware that genuine popular support in the United States is required to carry out any Government policy, foreign or domestic. The American people make up their own minds and no governmental action can change it.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#55. Of course you are American,' he said, and waived his hand, like waving away the sentiment. 'What other country can throw away money sending its people to live with savages?
Tony D'Souza
#56. Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.
Neil Jordan
#57. I guess, then, that is what I find troublesome about this plan. It is too logical, too clever, too carefully thought out, and, most important of all, it has to be carried out in secret, which means that if the American public knew about it, they would be appalled and would not be supportive of it.
J.W. Amran
#58. No foreign policy will stick unless the American people are behind it. And unless Congress understands it. And unless Congress understands it, the American people aren't going to understand it.
W. Averell Harriman
#59. We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might.
Theodore C. Sorensen
#60. Foreign aid is neither a failure nor a panacea. It is, instead, an important tool of American policy that can serve the interests of the United States and the world if wisely administered.
Lee H. Hamilton
#61. Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy.
Frank Wolf
#62. Everything in our foreign and domestic policy is a question of issue for the American people to vote on.
John Dingell
#63. Many American pundits and foreign policy experts love to depict themselves as crusaders for human rights, but it almost always takes the form of condemning other governments, never their own.
Glenn Greenwald
#64. Unlike George Bush and his friends at the big oil companies, I'm going to work for a real energy policy for this country that decreases America's dependence on foreign oil and helps lower the costs to American families.
John F. Kerry
#65. The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
Henry A. Kissinger
#66. American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.
Samantha Power
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