Michael Hastings Quotes

The minute you start arming people in these conflict zones, things don't go as expected. We also need to look at precedent before making these decisions. Instead of listening to Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric, we should look at how he's behaved. The fact is he's been making concessions recently. He gave up his nuclear weapons. He allowed hundreds of Americans to evacuate Tripoli. Did he crack down on his people who revolted? Yes, but that's not so unusual.

The United States should not have to intervene in every single problem around the world. The voters of this country are reacting in a very big, broad way to Mr. Trump. They are frustrated by lousy decisions made by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Look at the mess we have.

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.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had Ken O'Donnell. He was ready to protect this nation, but he was not ready for a military solution just because it was being rammed down his throat.

I've been arguing this for months. This is not our war. This is not a war we should be in. Australia's better spending its time negotiating with North Korea.

This president failed so miserably in diplomacy that we are now forced to war.

Our safety requires a long-term military presence in the Middle East because that's where the plans to attack us are emanating.

I certainly don't like a label that suggests I believe that the military is the solution to most of the world's problems.

Perhaps we have acted too hastily. … it may have been unwise for us to send an army into Smyrna, but now that the army is there, it would be more unwise to withdraw it -- to do so would admit military failure and court political defeat.

There is no area where experience matters more than in war and diplomacy.

I could have been very popular if I had launched a military attack on Iran but I chose patience.

The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene. It is up to the civilians to tell us what they want to do and we’ll figure out how to do it.

[The Kosovo intervention] would set a dangerous precedent to commit our troops to fighting civil wars for independence in every corner of the world.

No American witnessing the way that President George W. Bush and his generals have bungled the Iraq war can deny that our leaders, civilian and military alike, will have to get a lot smarter if the U.S. armed services are to persuade the Islamic world to embrace the blessings of democracy.

I am saddened, saddened that this President [George W. Bush] failed so miserably at diplomacy that were now forced to war.

Military security and a policy of detente are not contradictory but complementary.

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

Is a military solution the only way to stop nations from doing bad things?

The sometimes contradictory demands of the American people—perfect security at home without burdensome military engagements abroad—have fueled the technology-driven, tactical approach of drone warfare.

The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government

When Americans support using our military abroad, they want to see a clear plan. They want to know what they need to do and when - and policymakers want to know that there's broad public support for the effort.