Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Richard N. Haass - Page 2

When great powers fade, as they inevitably must, it's normally for one of two reasons. Some powers exhaust themselves through overreach abroad, underinvestment at home, or a mixture of the two. This was the case for the Soviet Union. Other powers lose their privileged position with the emergence of new, stronger powers.

On occasion, terrorists will succeed despite our best efforts. That is part of the legacy of 9/11. But 9/11 also shows us that while terrorists can destroy, they are unable to create.

How can we pressure China on North Korea if China's one of the two largest holders of American debt?

The first Iraq War was one of necessity because vital U.S. interests were at stake, and we reached the point where no other national-security instruments were likely to achieve the necessary goal, which was the reversal of Saddam Hussein's invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

American influence in the world depends on the ability to act with real capacity and set an example that others will want to follow. This all takes resources.

Donald Trump's United States is not isolationist. He has authorized the use of limited military force against the Syrian government in a manner his predecessor rejected.

I did not believe in the Iraq war.

America must reduce its fiscal deficit, modernize its infrastructure, and improve its schools.

Living with a nuclear North Korea could give its leaders the confidence to act more aggressively versus South Korea. It could also, over time, drive both South Korea and Japan, as well as countries farther afield such as Vietnam, to reconsider their non-nuclear postures. The stability of a critical region of the world would suddenly be in doubt.

There is no way to know for certain what accounts for North Korean decisionmaking, given how closed a country it is.

There's a pattern in Bush 43's presidency of being attracted to the big and the bold, and my whole reading of him is that he was instinctively uncomfortable with what you might call a modulated foreign policy - a foreign policy of adjustment, of degree.

Our inability to govern ourselves at home, to deal with everything from infrastructure to our debt to tax policy, is reducing the appeal of the American model.

The horror and tragedy that was 9/11 did many things; one of them was to galvanize this country and much of the world against terrorists and those who support them.

The decision to attack Iraq in March 2003 was discretionary; it was a war of choice.

If anything, what happened in Iraq after the fall of Saddam set back prospects for democratic reform in the region, as many came to associate political change with chaos.

Good people cannot fully compensate for bad process, but they can mitigate some of its worst tendencies.

Terrorists continue to be outliers with limited appeal at best.

I tend to be one of those who does not equate democratization with the holding of elections. The emphasis ought to be on such things as rule of law, economic reform, and promotion of a free media - in short, essentially independent, free institutions.

The United States emerged from the Cold War with unprecedented absolute and relative power. It was truly first among unequals.

Dissent is as American as cherry pie.

Black markets exist any time there is a profit to be made.

Terrorism is a decentralized phenomenon - in its funding, planning, and execution.

Any time you use military force, you have got to have a clear purpose that military forces can achieve.

White House staff are meant to coordinate and set policy, not carry it out.

If you assume away most or all of the questions or difficulties, you can persuade yourself of just about anything.

Foreign policy must be about priorities. The United States cannot do everything everywhere.

Campaigning and governing are two very different activities, and there is no reason to assume that how Trump conducted the former will dictate how he approaches the latter.

Vietnam was not a war of choice the United States had to fight. It was clearly not central.

Trade accords had been a staple of the post-World War II world, providing a mechanism for economic growth, development, and association with friends and allies, and a means of reining in would-be adversaries who otherwise would have little incentive to act with restraint.

Trump is the first post-World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits.

The political world is defined by relationships rather than transactions, and by numerous actors at home and abroad with independent power. Navigating such a world is difficult and precarious.

The Trump administration has been characterized by adhocracy during its initial months. The initiative limiting immigration is a case in point. The new policy was not vetted fully within the administration - indeed, then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates first read the decision after the text of the new executive order was published online.

No amount of sanctioning will persuade North Korea to give up nuclear weapons, nor will China step up and solve the problem for us.

What is obvious is that Donald Trump is comfortable with an approach to running his presidency based on what worked for him in the private sector.

Terrorism needs to be de-legitimized in the way that slavery has been. Doing so will make governments and individuals think twice before becoming a party to terrorism; it should also make it less difficult to garner support for international action against those who nevertheless carry it out.

There is no getting around the reality that the second Iraq war was a war of choice; had it been carried out differently, it still would have been an expensive choice and almost certainly a bad one.

The Internet, one of the great inventions of the modern Western world, has shown itself to be a weapon that can be used to incite and train those who wish to cause harm to that world.

Terrorists and terrorism cannot be eliminated any more than we can rid the world of disease. There will always be those who will resort to force against innocent men, women, and children in pursuit of political goals.

For President Bush, the first, the 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, I spent all 4 years of his presidency on the staff for the National Security Council.

I think Hillary Clinton is more suspicious, clearly tougher on Russian policy in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria; more willing to support sanctions; not against negotiating with Putin, but I would say tougher and more skeptical. And Donald Trump has talked about revisiting policy towards Ukraine, revisiting policy about sanctions towards Russia, not as quick to criticize Putin for what he might be up to in Syria and propping up the regime there - so just seems to be more open to the possibilities of working out some kind of a - I guess you'd call a modus vivendi with Putin.

The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy.

The U.S. position on Jerusalem was not the reason why there hasn't been progress towards peace. The reason is that both the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership are divided. And there is an enormous gap between Israelis and Palestinians. To say that this decision is only recognizing reality, that Jerusalem is the actual capital of Israel - well, that's true. But it's a selective recognition of reality.

If there's any country that has the capacity not to control North Korea, but to influence North Korea, it's still China. The Chinese always say they have very little influence. They have more than they say they do. We should put pressure on them to do it and there's finally, we're seeing the first signs of a little bit of Chinese disaffection. At some point they're getting tired of the antics of this country. This is a dangerous ally for China to have. And the more Chinese can pressure them and put the economic screws on them, the better it will be for everybody.

Sovereignty must be redefined if states are to cope with globalisation.

Globalisation thus implies that sovereignty...needs to become weaker.

You cannot be effective if those who work for you are not. So building their effectiveness ought to be a priority.

Some governments are prepared to give up elements of sovereignty to address the threat of global climate change.

Television was our chief tool in selling our policy.

I've worked for four presidents, and I've concluded that almost nothing is inevitable. History is to a significant extent the result of the interaction of personalities and ideas. And so I don't believe war between the U.S. and China is in any way inevitable, and it's well within the province of diplomacy and statecraft to avoid it.

Hillary Clinton is pretty much what we would call a foreign-policy realist, someone who thinks the purpose of American foreign policy should be to adjust the foreign policies of other countries, work closely with traditional allies in Europe and Asia towards that end.

If the president Donald Trump had connected the Jerusalem question to some other positions, linking it to Israeli and Palestinian behavior or putting the Jerusalem statement in a larger context of U.S. policy, it could have potentially advanced the peace process. But I don't see how singling it out might help.

Well, we ought to make clear to everybody that the next Korean War, if one were ever to happen, is going to be the last Korean War because it's going to end with a unified peninsula, and it's go to be under Seoul, not Pyongyang.

Jerusalem is a holy site for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Israelis and Palestinians both lay claim to it as their capital. Jerusalem is the most sensitive of all the issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. But Donald Trump determined an important aspect of the United States' position towards Jerusalem before any agreement. Most of the rest of the world feels that it ought not to be dealt with first, that it ought not to be dealt with separately, and that it ought not to be dealt with unilaterally.

Shockingly enough, what people say during campaigns is meant to increase the odds they get elected.

States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves.

We ought to be doing much more in North America. We are on the cusp of an energy revolution. And we do need to be doing more at home. The biggest national security threats facing the United States right now are not in the Middle East. They are domestic.

China likes the idea of sovereign rights when it comes to organizing their politics as they see fit, and their economics. But they may grudgingly come to understand certain things differently in the area of climate or disease. China is a country fairly integrated into the world. Yet China is uncomfortable with this idea because they worry it will constrain their freedom, politically and economically, to do what they believe they need to do to maintain political stability and cohesion.

The reason I called the president Donald Trump a disrupter is that he came into office 70 years after World War II, 25-plus years after the end of the Cold War. Like any president, he didn't come into office with a blank slate - he entered with an enormous inheritance of relationships with institutions, policies and the like. And in my view he is much too quick to pull the U.S. out of various institutions and various agreements, and he's been much too quick to question the value of allies and alliances.

I think it was going to be hard to work with Russians on Syria. There is some potential overlap between the U.S. and Russia in that the Russians don't want to see the Syria situation unravel to a point where they have to escalate their own involvement. But at the moment, I don't see the U.S. and Russia on the same page in Syria. Russia seems much more interested in consolidating government control over liberated areas. It seems to me that the U.S. and Russia are proving they can disagree for independent reasons in any number of theaters.

Donald Trump is much more suspicious of international institutions; much more skeptical of the contributions that America's traditional allies have made; more willing, in some cases, to entertain the possibility of getting along with countries who some would call an adversary, such as Mr. Putin's Russia.