George Packer Quotes

On foreign policy, Obama has talked softly and carried a big stick.

The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a 'No Drama' rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management.

The mantra from the Obama State Department is 'smart power' - the not-so-new idea that all elements of national power should be utilized to influence other countries.

In foreign policy, the only thing worse than not doing something is doing something that fails or makes the situation worse.

The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.

Obama is thoroughly mixed up with all these things he's got. He's got to solve Libya. He's got to solve Afghanistan. He's everywhere. And this nation, I don't know why it's not showing the leadership and capacity to attend different issues at the same time.

President Obama's record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship.

Ninety percent of foreign policy is reacting to whatever's happening out there.

Barack Obama, foreign policy wizard. I just have to laugh.

Foreign policy is about the execution of ideas as much as their formulation.

Obama has made incredibly poor decisions that have made us less safe.

I work with the president and speak with him multiple times a week. This is a man, he didn't become the president by accident. And as much as everyone wants to talk about stability, was he unstable when he passed the tax reform? Was he unstable when we finally hit back at Syria and said no more chemical weapons?

A supreme pragmatist, Kissinger was never interested in the art of the impossible - and nor, as a biographer, am I. That is why, having initially been invited to write his entire official biography, I eventually decided to devote myself to writing just one year in his life: 1973.

American foreign policy needs to be driven by what will get results and what is legal, not by what satisfies our primal instincts of revenge.

Now, the people that helped get Obama elected, who think Israel is a good idea, need to wake up and tell him they're our friends, let's preserve them. And then it would happen. Because that's the only kind of thing he responds to. But he throws our friends under the bus and rewards our enemies.

I have always thought that foreign-policy idealism has to be tempered with realism.

Both Bibi and Obama realize that they are going to have to face the problem of Iran together.

Obama's entire foreign policy was predicated on the notion that by existing, he would bridge all gaps and bury all hatchets. Instead, the Muslim world burns his picture even as he tells them he respects their radicalism. It turns out that diversity is a one-way street for the devotees of global Islam.

Obama's foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront.

In foreign policy you have to wait twenty-five years to see how it comes out.

Foreign policy is all about a universe of bad decisions, imperfect decisions; every situation is different. The dynamics, the atmospherics, the people, the pressures, the geopolitical realities shift.

I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.

I think President Obama has always been a little bit underestimated. Some of the things he's done with foreign policy have been unassailable. Getting us out of Iraq, killing Osama Bin Laden.

What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan.

Every day as Chancellor I see alerts telling me of risks around the world.