A Quote by Stephen Kinzer

Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference.

Stephen Kinzer

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Acted American Around Around The World Beginning Business Cases Century Clandestine Defend Each Each Time Economic Establish First Governments However Interests Interference Intervention Liberation Mainly Military Military Power Most National National Security Overthrow Power Promote Protect Reasons Refused Repeatedly Rhetoric Right Security Services Specifically States Throughout Time Twentieth Twentieth Century Twenty United United States Used Without World

Quote Author

Stephen Kinzer
American - Author
Born: August 4, 1951

Actually, the phrase "national security" is barely used until the 1930s. And there's a reason. By then, the United States was beginning to become global. Before that the United States had been mostly a regional power - Britain was the biggest global power. After the Second World War, national security is everywhere, because we basically owned the world, so our security is threatened everywhere. Not just on our borders, but everywhere - so you have to have a thousand military bases around the world for "defense."

Noam Chomsky

First, we must continually reaffirm the principle that the security of the United States is not, and should never be, a partisan matter. The United States can best defend its national security interests abroad by uniting behind a bipartisan security policy at home.

William Cohen

American national security and American economic interests, of course - every president, every secretary of state - that is the primary goal. As you are in this job and in the work, you begin to see, though, that in the long run, both American economic interests and American national security are better served when there are other decent countries in the world who are both your allies and even when your adversaries are acting more decently.

Condoleezza Rice

I have nothing but contempt for Gadhafi. I'm not a Gadhafi supporter in any way. However, it's not clear to me that it's a vital and compelling national security objective of the United States that we ought to use military force to remove him from power. He's not the only unpleasant and unsavory dictator in the world.

Pat Toomey

Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making.

Ted Cruz

Without education, we are weaker economically. Without economic power, we are weaker in terms of national security. No great military power has ever remained so without great economic power.

Jon Meacham

There's no question that the US is engaged in economic spying. If there's information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they'll go after that information and they'll take it.

Edward Snowden

We have the greatest resource universities in the world, the only place in the world. We have the most productive workforce in the world. We have the most agile venture capitalists in the world. We have a situation where right now in the United States of America, we are near energy independent. North America is beginning to be the epicenter of energy. What is it that makes people think that this is not going to be the American century? I don't get it.

Joe Biden

What America first means is we put the national interests of the United States and the well-being of our own country and our own people first. Our foreign policy, first and foremost, should be focused on the defense of American freedom, security and rights.

Pat Buchanan

As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.

Joel Bakan

I believe our foreign assistance should be scrutinized, should be debated, and that we should strike the right balance, but in all cases the foreign assistance that we provide around the world should be used to further our national security interests.

John Sununu

America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth.

Michael Martin Hammer

To his credit, Obama has undertaken a truly ambitious effort to redefine the United States' view of the world and to reconnect the United States with the emerging historical context of the twenty-first century. He has done this remarkably well.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

Robert D. Kaplan

Is the United States going to decide, are the people of this country going to decide that their Federal Government shall in the future have no right under any implied power or any court-approved power to enter into a solution of a national economic problem, but that that national economic problem must be decided only by the States?... We thought we were solving it, and now it has been thrown right straight in our faces. We have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

From time to time, the irresponsible acts of the Cuban government remind us that this is far more than about the freedom of one country, but it really is about the stability and security of the region and the national security interests of the United States.

Mel Martinez

A Quote by Stephen Kinzer

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