Francis Mairs Huntington-Wilson Quotes

You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done

I did more than anyone else in persuading the U.S. to get rid of Saddam.

Rogue regimes never respond to anything less than hardball.

In my experience, in bringing coercive diplomacy to bear against Slobodan Milosevic, no bomb strike was more important than maintaining NATO's cohesion.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Colin Powell has said over the years that Saddam Hussein is like a toothache. It recurs from time to time, and you just have to live with it. At other times, he's compared Saddam Hussein to a kidney stone that will eventually pass. But he has never said, 'You have to operate and take out the kidney stone.'

I do not believe that diplomacy equals weakness…. If you are going to use force you better make sure that it is effective.

Foreign policy works best when force and diplomacy are used together.

Diplomacy, when matched by force, can achieve our objectives.

No American President should ever take any option off the table.

Wars are ... often the product of the conflicting intentions of decent men who have lost the patience to negotiate.

It were, indeed, a vain and dangerous illusion to believe that in the present or probable condition of human society a commerce so extensive and so rich as ours could exist and be pursued in safety without the continual support of a military marine -- the only arm by which the power of this Confederacy can be estimated or felt by foreign nations, and the only standing military force which can never be dangerous to our own liberties at home.

UN administrators ... think that no problem in the world is too intractable to be solved by negotiation. These mandarins fail to grasp that men with guns do not respect men with nothing but flapping gums ... Just as the US Marine Corps breeds warriors, so the UN’s culture breeds conciliators.

Iran is for negotiations…. This is the principle of Iranian Foreign Policy…. Iranians should make sure that the United States is not using pressure on Iran for negotiations.

Making coercive diplomacy work requires a mix of threats and promises—sticks and carrots.

Foreign policy is painstakingly difficult, and if there is to be anything gained from the experience in Libya, it is how not to conduct world affairs.

There must be pressure on Moscow so that we have negotiations. Moscow will not succeed by unilaterally backing Bashar al-Assad.

Pakistan is not a rogue state, but it harbours and covertly supports rogue elements. While war is not the answer, hard or coercive diplomacy could be.

If you don't want war, then you had better be an advocate for diplomacy with muscle.

It's a fraction of the cost to prevent a war than prosecute a war.

The key lesson of the 1930s is that appeasement leads directly to war.

If people know you have the big bazooka, you probably don't have to use it.

Richard Nixon, famously, conducted his foreign policy according to the 'madman theory': he tried to convince enemy leaders that he was irrational and volatile in an attempt to intimidate them. But this was a potentially useful approach to foreign policy only because it was an act.

In the years leading up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, thinking about defense was driven by ideas that regarded successful military operations as ends in themselves rather than just one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve - and sustain - political goals.