Nobuaki Makino Quotes

When America rejected the League, she had deliberately chosen to rest solely upon treaties with the sanction of public opinion alone…

…though the American government did much to encourage the organs of the League, the fact that it stood aside, sharing neither the rights nor the duties of the League powers, was a fatal handicap to joint action.

If the savior of man would revisit and declare himself for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it.

It seems the most common thing for serial interventionists to do these days is to lob the term 'isolationist' at anyone who does not agree with their latest folly, and then set up a straw man about those people not wanting to be involved in the world.

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.

After September 11, the European governments have completely failed. They are incapable of seeing beyond their own national scope of interests.

I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that.

The international body must have the institutions and powers it needs to do what it is created to do; in other words it must be boldly and openly set up as a super-state on a level above the national sovereignties, and that, in turn, means that the Member States must have accepted in advance as much limitation and subordination of their particular sovereignties as this superior sovereign power requires.

Worries about misplaced sovereignty [at the UN] … appear to come primarily from people aggrieved to find the United Nations so full of foreigners.

To the creators of the League of Nations who originated the first serious efforts to a better understanding between nations

The United Nations is really the League of Nations 2.0

No nation can build a safer, better world alone.

Let us mingle with other nations as one of them and not stand as one apart. Let us seek their friendship not their hate.

The League of Nations seemed to us the embryo of a future international organization; and for the struggle against the internationales, whether Socialistic or Communist, it offered the best possible instrument. It was a great blow to us when the United States refused to become a party to these hopes.

Isolationism is not leadership.

Finally we are a nation with some conscience. It means alliances are extremely important when they're based on a national interest. We have to have the ability to sustain our presence within those alliances.

Isolationism is over.

Like Canada, we very much wanted the United Nations to be a relevant and effective body. But once those efforts failed, we no longer saw things from a multilateral perspective. For us, now, it is much more basic than that. It is about family.

Yesterday, the president met with a group he calls the coalition of the willing. Or, as the rest of the world calls them, Britain and Spain.

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.

Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II.

I don't know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.

The nations must be organized internationally and induced to enter into partnership, subordinating in some measure national sovereignty to worldwide institutions and obligations.

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.

If the U.N. didn't exist, we'd be inventing it right now.