Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

“I explained that to May,” Verhofstadt said. “I said, You have a problem, you try to solve it. We on the Continent are different. We need first a concept. If we have a concept, then we are going to try and put every problem that we have inside that concept.”

“There are two kinds of European nations,” Kristian Jensen, the Danish Finance Minister, said last year, referring to Britain’s situation. “There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”


EU folks talking to/about the UK on Brexit (in The New Yorker)

Thursday, April 05, 2018

The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Empowering friends, picking your battles, always checking principle with prudence, never overestimating American capacities, but never overestimating the enemy’s strength: this is best seen not as a strategy for all contingencies but as a disposition, a habit of mind, a temperament.


Michael Ignatieff on George Kennan's approach to US foreign policy, America's Melancholic Hero (The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014).

Monday, September 02, 2013

You should only pick your own nose.


Heard from a nice lady in Iowa.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Fear always runs the State Department. They always follow what they are most afraid of.

Averell Harriman, as quoted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, New York Review of Books of October 11, 2007.