Paul Wolfowitz
Paul Wolfowitz
Paul Dundes Wolfowitzis a former President of the World Bank, United States Ambassador to Indonesia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, and former dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships, and chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth22 December 1943
CountryUnited States of America
Part of what is wrong with the view of American imperialism is that it is antithetical to our interests. We are better off when people are governing themselves. I'm sure there is some guy that will tell you that philosophy is no different from the Roman Empire's. Well, it is fundamentally different.
Generally speaking, the stronger the connection between the financing and the ultimate beneficiary, the better the result.
Support for peaceful reform by the people themselves is the right way to promote democracy, not the use of force.
I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject.
You can't be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS.
Look, I think the notion that there's a dogma or doctrine of foreign policy that gives you a textbook recipe for how to react to all situations is really nonsense.
The internal affairs of other countries has a big impact on American interests.
No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren't about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.
Before September 11, terrorism was viewed as something ugly but you lived with it.
Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict.
History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible.
I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.
We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.
For the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all.