Skip to content

Americans officials have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe really have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem on Iraq — by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action — than they have ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

— Robert Kagan

Another quote →

More quotes by Robert Kagan

When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.

No one sitting in Germany in 1945 would have said, “Oh don’t worry, it’s just natural to become a democracy.”

In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.

The force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States...

The vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction.

All Robert Kagan quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Kagan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.