This is the problem with foreign policy - talking about foreign policy in a political context. Politics is binary. People win and lose elections. Legislation passes or doesn't pass. And in foreign policy often what you're doing is nuance and you're trying to prevent something worse from happening. It doesn't translate well into a political environment.
I think the only way that political system can be corrected is for the American people to see very vividly that it needs repair. If things are going to worse in the future, the American people, in every congressional district in the land, might demand that reforms take place in the political system.
Democrats encouraged a porous southern border because they saw migrants and their American-born children as a source of future political support.
I don't think we can depend on Congress. In the American political system - we have been brought up to believe that the American political system works beautifully; it is democratic; Congress represents us; the President is elected, he represents us - it doesn't work that way.
Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers.
A country that cannot count its own illegal aliens - estimates range from 8-12 million - with a porous 2,000 mile border is not secure despite twelve carrier battle groups. We must accept that it is a cornerstone of Mexican foreign policy to export illegally each year a million of its own to the United States to avoid needed reform at home and to influence American domestic policy.
I think, overall, India is today on the move. The economic reforms that our salvation lies in - operating an open society, political system, an open economy, economic system - this has widespread support.
What we're trying to do every day is make policy and work on behalf of the American people.
If you think about making a city that is much more porous, many accessible spaces, that is a political position, because you don't fortify, you open it up so that many people can use it.
If people work together in an open way with porous boundaries - that is, if they listen to each other and really talk to each other - then they are bound to trade ideas that are mutual to each other and be influenced by each other. That mutual influence and open system of working creates collaboration.
Ovince Saint Preux needs to know that not only me but every other guy at the American Kickboxing Academy are ready and open to open those doors in trying to help him accomplish his goals.
In the U.S. you have a system of lobbying and influence on our policy and law makers which is incredibly pronounced. The gas industry spent $250 million getting an exemption from our Safe Water Act. Every one of those dollars is toxic; a contaminant in our political system. It disrupts the normal flow of justice, science, fact and reporting.
The American system of political spending is so unregulated that it might make Adam Smith rethink free markets.
From a distance, the American political system is a remarkable success. We have accomplished the peaceful transfer of power for more than two hundred years, and that's unmatched by any civilization in human history. Up close, our political system still has all the ugliness and bad actors that you might suspect.
It is a key fact about American policy in Vietnam that the withdrawel of American troops was built into it from the start. None of the presidents who waged war in Vietnam contemplated an open-ended campaign; all promised the public that American troops would be able to leave in the not-too-remote future. The promise of withdrawel precluded a policy of occupation of the traditional colonial sort, in which a great power simply imposes its will on a small one indefinitely.
I think that one of the things that we all agree to is that the touchstone for economic policy is, does it allow the average American to find good employment and see their incomes rise; that we can't just look at things in the aggregate, we do want to grow the pie, but we want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions and occupations and genders and races; and that economic policy should focus on growing the pie, but it also has to make sure that everybody has got opportunity in that system.