Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.

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