Pete Hoekstra Quotes

The art of foreign policy is to help guide the inevitable.

U. S. Foreign Policy is usually largely reactive.

It's important that all around the globe that the United States is pursuing the most effective foreign policy possible.

In these days of intimate relations, of economic stress and of intense desire to protect national interests and advance national opportunity, the treatment of questions which, from a legal standpoint, are domestic, often seriously affects international relations. The principle, each nation for itself to the full extent of its powers, is the principle of war, not of peace.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

If governments do not want to work with the U.N. and the international organizations, there is a limit to what you can do. And there is also a limit to patience.

Foreign policy matters cannot be intelligently decided in a large general meeting.

You do not build a foreign policy based on one man.

The United Nations is a failed institution in its current form.

There is no way that any major international problem anywhere in the world can be solved efficiently with the United States sitting on the sideline.

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

Foreign policy should be strategic, not tactical.

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

Even allies don’t share every single interest that you have. That’s a law of nature in the international system. They will tell you most of what you need to know but there may be some things that they don’t tell you that you need to know in order to formulate your policy as wisely as you can.

As long as the problem of world reconstruction remains the center of interest for all nations, blocs having similar attitudes will form and operate even within the League itself.

They were unable to stand up and say: 'Here's our policy. It's Unite the world against terrorism.'

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

A great nation like the United States has many and varied interests, and we need both to do business with tyrants and to engage constantly in multilateral diplomacy.

It's not just Iraq - it's the Atlantic partnership which is at stake.

The answer dictates what the policy should be in our relationships with every country in the world.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

The United States has got to adopt a policy of befriending and creating allies around the world.

During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy.

Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.