Diplomatic Blunders Quotes

You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.

The genius of you Americans is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves.

An American diplomat is sometimes like a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.

Though secrecy in diplomacy is occasionally unavoidable, it has its perils ... Publicity may cause some losses, but may avert some misfortunes.

Nothing he [a Foreign Secretary] can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.

Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer -- a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.

One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

The fact is, almost everything Hillary Clinton's done in foreign policy has been a mistake and it's been a disaster.

I didn't do anything for Russia. I've done nothing for Russia. Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember? With the stupid plastic button that made us all look like a bunch of jerks. Here, take a look. Lavrov looked at her like, what the hell is she doing with that cheap plastic button?