Quotes About Diplomacy

I think we need to ask serious questions about how we engage militarily, when we engage militarily, and on what basis we engage militarily. What kind of intelligence do we have to justify a military engagement?

I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

I've heard people say in the U.N. community among mediators they don't like women as mediators because they're too quick to compromise.

Mass killing has very clearly not been eliminated, nor has the 'international community' developed a response that will avert it or bring it to a quick end.

I really think Canada should get over to Iraq as quickly as possible.

I'm not sure you can do anything quickly or easily with the North.

The crises in North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, show how quickly things can change and how they can go wrong. We must be prepared. And right now the Army is not.

Quiet diplomacy is far more effective than public posturing.

President Nixon was a pragmatic strategist. He would engage, not contain, China, but he would also quietly set pieces into place for a fallback position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen.

Each one of my budgets has taken a meat axe to foreign aid, because I think we ought to quit sending it to countries that hate us.

We need to quit appeasing our adversaries, and we need to stand with our allies.

We are not quitters. Britain has always gone out there; we have probably been more influential than any other country in shaping our world and the way it has thought about itself, the way we interact as nations.

I'm not an expert on the arms race.

I don't think a country needs to bypass diplomacy, they don't need to attack us under the radar.

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.

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them.

The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America's publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests.

It is good that the Canadians are raising the flag among Western countries to raise the issue of human rights abuse throughout the Middle East.

It is wrong to make anyone into an enemy; it is wrong to scare the people of one's own country with that enemy and try to rally some allies on that basis.

Chinese President Xi Jinping says that if Canada wants free access to Chinese markets, Trudeau should first ram a pipeline to the B.C. coast on China's behalf.

My father ran for Congress in 2004, and I got a sense that there is no way to achieve much success without a certain amount of compromise.

Hardly had I left when we ran into the Korean war, doubled what I had asked for and doubled it again. I had told him I would stay in Government, be honored to, but not with the Air Force.

In the journey to peace and to reunification, I always emphasize that we are not climbing just one mountain, we are climbing a range of mountains and, of course in this process, we will face a lot of difficulties. However, peace will be settled and the two Koreas will achieve reunification.

We had a great chance in the mid-2000s to reach an accord with the Chinese on both energy and environmental issues. That deal would have essentially been that the U.S. could provide the equipment and expertise, and the Chinese would help close the trade gap. It was a huge opportunity that we failed to exploit.