Quotes from Antony Blinken

Whether we like it or not, we don't choose Saudi Arabia's leaders. They do.

It's one thing for a foreign partner to doubt a president's judgment; it's entirely more debilitating when that partner doubts the president's word.

Most of the money that we provide to the WTO is done on a voluntary basis.

I think that over time, China believes that it - it - it can be and should be and will be the dominant country in the world.

Some friends of Israel believe that the Palestinians will never, in their hearts, accept a Jewish state in Palestine. Yet Germans and French, Chinese and Japanese, Mexicans and Americans have overcome their once insurmountable differences. Palestinians and Jews also have much to gain from peaceful coexistence.

Every administration suffers its share of 'what the president meant to say' moments.

When we're in the business of picking fights with our allies instead of working with them, that takes away from our strength in dealing with China.

As the personal trajectories of Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi diverge, so too does the focus of their leadership. While Mr. Trump is obsessed with building walls, Mr. Xi is busy building bridges.

Every time Mr. Trump provokes howls from the establishment, his base cheers and gets re-energized.

We deal, unfortunately, every single day with leaders of countries who are responsible for actions we find either objectionable or abhorrent, whether it's Vladimir Putin, whether it's Xi Jinping, whether it's any others on a long list of people I can name. But we find ways to deal with them.

The United States will rightfully go on deploring human rights excesses in the Soviet Union. And it is hardly likely Americans will one day espouse the communist ideology. But nowhere does it say we cannot live in peace with the U.S.S.R. In the nuclear age, there is truly no alternative.

The United States genuinely sought to advance Russia's integration into the West and into international institutions. We genuinely sought to support Russia. We wanted a strong, successful Russia, not a weak and contained one.

The Iranian regime is nothing if not resilient. It fought an eight-year-long war with Iraq to a draw despite losing hundreds of thousands of lives; it has survived decades of isolation.

Chomsky's characterization of the United States as a 'propaganda' state like all the rest - distinguishable only by its more effective and seductive salesmanship - is particularly hard to swallow.

If Xi Jinping is the world's most powerful man, conventional wisdom puts Vladimir Putin a close second. He's made his own bare-chested virility synonymous with a resurgent Russia.

Public diplomacy was an effective Cold War weapon.

The Iran nuclear deal, the so-called JCPOA, was very effective in cutting off all of the pathways that Iran then had to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon. And we know that that agreement was working.

In my judgment, the JCPOA for whatever its limitations, was succeeding on its own terms in blocking Iran's pathways to producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon on short order.

President Donald J. Trump was right to strike at the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using a weapon of mass destruction, the nerve agent sarin, against its own people.

President-elect Biden is committed to the proposition that Iran will not acquire a nuclear weapon.

Climate change, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. None of those can really effectively be dealt with by any one country acting alone and even the United States can't handle them alone. China needs to be part of the game on that.

As we look at China, there is no doubt that it poses the most significant challenge of any nation state to the United States, in terms of our interests the interest of the American people.

Pyongyang possesses thousands of artillery pieces 30 miles from Seoul. Just one retaliatory salvo could decimate South Korea's capital.

Look, we don't have the luxury of not dealing with China. There are real complexities to the relationship, whether it's the adversarial piece, whether it's the competitive piece, whether it's the cooperative piece.