Foreign Policy – Government sources
“The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging, and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” – James Madison, Works 2:140-1
“Through many years of service in our government, with long access to records of what actually happened on numerous occasions (treaties with foreign nations), I am constantly reminded that our officials can not be blindly trusted to safeguard the national interest. Deceit, trickery, misrepresentation are ugly words, yet time and again in the last quarter century men in high places have been guilty of these practices as a cover-up and/or to achieve fantastic, fateful ends.” – Bryton Barron, former Chief of the Treaty Staff in the State Department of the United States. From his book Dream Becomes a Nightmare, the U.N. Today, p. 116
“We mistake the object of our government if we hope or wish that it is to make us respectable abroad. Conquest or superiority among other powers is not or ought not ever to be the object of republican systems.” — Charles Pinckney, spoken at Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, June 25, 1787
“I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation has a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another, that everyone had a right to form and adopt whatever government they like best to live under themselves, and that, if this country could, consistently with its engagements, maintain a strict neutrality and thereby preserve peace, it was bound to do so by motives of policy, interest, and every other consideration.” —
George Washington, August 25, 1796, Writings 13:263
“Until the last quarter of a century, this gospel of the Fathers was the polar star by which we set our international course. In the first hundred thirty years of our constitutional existence, we had three foreign wars, the first merely the final effort of our Revolution, which made good our independence. During the century that followed we had two foreign wars, neither of considerable magnitude. During the next twenty-three years, we had two global wars. While the gospel (foreign policy) of our Fathers guided us we had peace. When we forsook it, two great wars engulfed us.” — J. Reuben Clark, 22 November 1947
“We cannot clean up the mess in Washington, balance the budget, reduce taxes, check creeping Socialism, tell what is muscle or fat in our sprawling rearmament programs, purge subversives from our State Department unless we come to grips with our foreign policy, upon which all other policies depend.” — Senator Robert A. Taft, quoted by Phyllis Schlafly in A Choice Not an Echo, p, 26
