Lawrence Eagleburger Quotes

What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad.

What I can’t quite see at this stage is that the evidence, even to the president, seems to be that clear. And if it is that clear, I can’t understand why we are not capable of convincing our closest allies that given that evidence, they ought to join us in this effort.

We must advertise to U.S. business that we are there, that our attitude has changed, and that we care. When we are asked to help, we have to perform and provide the right advice.

We have to spend a lot more time training people to be good advocates of U.S. business.

There’s Hezbollah, there’s Hamas, there is a whole range of terrorist targets out there related to Palestine and to Israel that we ought to be trying to deal with. And there’s a great deal of targets in the Philippines, Indonesia. You name it, there are a number of places where there are targets that we ought to be trying to deal with.

There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.

There are sometimes problems for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which there is no solution.

There are a lot of other terrorist targets we ought to be focusing on. Well, there is Syria, for example, which is pumping through – because of Iran, is pumping weapons on into Hezbollah and so forth – which is then producing a lot of agony in Palestine and in Israel. We ought to be doing a bit to try to stop that.

The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it’s hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about it and prepared to do something.

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.

The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

The fact of the matter is that if we were going to do anything about Gaddafi, it should have been at the beginning. And by fooling around like this as long as we have, we have wasted an opportunity that would have gotten rid of him.

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

That said, there is a tendency to help the large industrial conglomerate more quickly than the small company you have never heard of. That is something in the culture we are trying to change.

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.

Small- and medium-sized companies do not know what we have to offer and that needs to be changed. We must react just as strenuously on their behalf as we do for larger companies.

One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear – the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don’t think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.

My point here is I think international pressures of our acting unilaterally again are going to be such that the administration will say, well, we just can’t take this on now.