Foreign policy simply cannot be judged by today's headlines that chalk up victories and defeats like so many box scores in the sports sections.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

The purpose of foreign policy is not to provide an outlet for our own sentiments of hope or indignation; it is to shape real events in a real world.

By this I mean that a political society does not live to conduct foreign policy; it would be more correct to say that it conducts foreign policy in order to live.

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security

It is like our foreign policy has attention deficit disorder.