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Foreign policy/relations

Thursday 2nd of October 2025

Foreign policy For the fourth or fifth time in my life, America is said to be on the verge of something called “isolationism”. The record, by contrast, tells us to expect another show of force in some remote trouble spot or other by mid-decade. Go with the record. … Fusing the worst of the right (aggression) with the worst of the left (righteousness), the itch to intervene is at least cross-partisan. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 7, 2021 [Ganesh was born in 1982] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign policy Foreign policy, after all, is not cartography. It's orienteering – racing madly through dangerous, unknown territory.  And theorists aren't mapmakers, they're coaches; their job is to help players race better.  Maps provide crucial information,  but the players have to use them out in the field, trying to move as fast as possible relative to others without getting hurt. Offered two bad maps, smart players wouldn't pick one or toss both. They'd take both along and put them to use. Policymakers should do the same, carrying both realist and liberal maps of the world with them as they go, filtering and combining them as possible. Gideon Rose, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign policy Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy. Jimmy Carter © 2023 Kwiple.com
Foreign policy Level whatever criticisms you may about the often bloodstained hands of the American colossus on the world stage, but Trump's foreign policy was different: shortsighted, transactional, mecurial, untrustworthy, boorish, personalist, and profoundly illiberal in rhetoric, disposition and creed. Jonathan Kirshner, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations Alliances are predicated on reliability and predictability, and no ally is likely to view the United States as it did before. Seeds of doubt have been sown: if it could happen once, it could happen again. It is difficult to regain a throne after abdicating it. Richard Haass, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c America is behaving like the Soviet Union, and China is behaving like the United States. Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won? © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other's deepest insecurities. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c An unchallenged US is a divided US. It follows that America's best hope of retaining some cohesion in the coming decades is a mighty China. What is disastrous for its relative power in the world might turn out to be a godsend for its internal cohesion. Decline has its uses. … The US requires two things of an enemy: vast scale (to induce fear) and a different model of government (for a sense of otherness). The absence of the first is why al-Qaeda turned out to be such a fleeting adhesive after the September 11, 2001 atrocities. … As to the second condition, boom-era Japan, a fellow democracy, lacked it and so never crossed from daunting commercial rival to nation-binding enemy. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, 2021/02/16 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations Assassination is not a foreign policy headline, Gideon Rachman column, Financial Times print edition, January 7, 2020 [online headline: “America should drop the ‘Dr Evil fallacy’ on assassination”] © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c Biden supposedly values allies. Europe’s chagrin is that Biden could have fulfilled both vows [ending forever wars and rebuilding alliances] if he had closely consulted with them on his Afghan exit. He chose not to. The fact that Nato was there at America’s behest rubbed salt into the wound. The 9/11 attacks marked the only time Nato has invoked its Article V mutual defence clause — following an assault on America, not Europe. Edward Luce, Financial Times, August 24, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations Distant water cannot put out a nearby fire. Chinese and Vietnamese proverb used across Asia to express doubts about America's reliability as an ally © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c The driving force behind the Hamiltonian renewal is the rising importance of the interdependence of corporate success and state power. … This connection operates most strongly at the most advanced levels of tech and production: the information-finance-business-government complex is increasingly necessary to the prosperity and security of the American state and people. …  Washington is going to worry more about whether its leading tech companies are strong enough and well resourced enough to stay ahead of their Chinese rivals than about whether U.S. tech companies are becoming too big. Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations The entire foreign policy is based on a single unstable individual's reaction to perceptions of slights or flattery. If someone says something nice about him, they are our friend; if they say something unkind, they are our enemy. Henry Kissinger on the Trump's foreign policy © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations From this day forward, it's going to be only America first. Donald Trump, Inaugural speech, January 20, 2017 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations The hard-liners [in Reagan's administration] felt that foreign policy and covert operations were an exclusively presidential domain. “The business of Congress is to stay the [expletive] out of my business” is how Reagan's first C.I.A. director, William Casey, put it in an interview with the political scientist Loch K. Johnson. Mattathias Schwartz, New York Times Magazine, June 7, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations Hugh Barrera, an ARENA contender for the presidency, told Laurie Becklund of The Los Angeles Times  when she asked  in April of 1982 if ARENA did not fear losing American aid by trying to shut the Christian Democrats out of the government, “Congress would not risk losing a whole country over one party. That would be turning against a U.S. ally and encouraging Soviet intervention here. It would not be intelligent.” In other words, “anti-communism” was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take. Joan Didion, Salvador [ARENA is a right-wing party in El Salvador] © 2017 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian? Donald Trump, on being told the president of Egypt called to congratulate him on becoming president © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations If you have an American president at foreign summits eating with his mouth closed and not throwing cutlery around, the world will give him a standing ovation. Unnamed Biden adviser quoted by Edward Luce, Financial Times, August 13, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations In Helsinki, @POTUS agreed to ongoing working level dialogue between the two security council staffs. President Trump asked @Ambjohnbolton to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway. Sarah Sanders, 12:51 PM - 19 Jul 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c Israel secretly authorized a group of cyber-surveillance firms to work for the government of Saudi Arabia despite international condemnation of the kingdom's abuse of surveillance software to crush dissent, even after the Saudi killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, government officials and others familiar with the contracts said. New York Times, July 17, 2021 [The firms involved are NSO, Candiru, Cellebrite, Nerint and Quadream] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations It is no accident that Carter's  first state visit as president was to Poland. Unfortunately, his interpreter mangled his words. Carter said that he was glad to be in Poland and wished to have close relations with its people. It came out as saying that he had left America for good and wanted to have sex with locals. Poles did not seem to mind. Edward Luce, Financial Times, Februry 22, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations Jaw, jaw, is better than war, war. Harold Macmillan © 2020 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations The list of democratically elected governments overthrown and leaders assassinated by the CIA, not to mention its failed attempts to accomplish those goals, is long—consider Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Venezuela. Then there is the shorter but still impressive list of countries that the US has reduced to rubble and social chaos – North Korea, Vietnam (again), Iraq, Libya. Everybody does not do this; the United States does, which is why global surveys repeatedly have shown that the US is widely believed to be the greatest threat to global peace. Jackson Lears, NY Rev. of Books, Jan. 14, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Foreign relations Today, hopes of a co-operative global economic order, which reached their zenith at the G20’s London summit of April 2009, have evaporated. Yet it is hardly a case of “Goodbye G20, hello G7”. The earlier world of G7 domination is even  more remote than that of G20 co-operation. Neither global co-operation nor western domination look feasible. What might follow? Alas, “division” might be one answer and “anarchy” another. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, May 23, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com