"All foreign policy is compromise," he said.
But the State Department argued that its ability to conduct foreign policy would be compromised if damages were awarded.
This is chiefly because its foreign policy is a compromise between powerful economic interests (in energy and armaments), the armed forces and the country's political leadership.
Western Europe, pampered for decades by generous social programs, is content with a risk-averse foreign policy that often emphasizes compromise over principles.
"This has involved several thousand documents, subject only to ensuring that national security and foreign policy objectives are not compromised as provided for in the protocol agreed at the outset of the inquiry.
The legislative body's preferred outcome is sometimes to demand a say while declining to endorse the kind of compromises that foreign policy often requires.
But as a tool to make things happen — to move legislation, to advance foreign policy agendas, or to achieve compromise on tough issues — the speeches by Mr. Obama have struggled to accomplish their tasks.
For the next 20 years he was out of the government as a man of the right; the disastrous Battle of Adwa (1896) in Ethiopia, which compromised the foreign policy of the left ministry, brought a new government in which Visconti-Venosta was again foreign minister.
The U.S. excuses now are the same ones we used when Armenians were killed in 1915 and Bosnians and Rwandans died in the 1990's: the bloodshed is in a remote area; we have other priorities; standing up for the victims may compromise other foreign policy interests.
Although Bush refused to sign the bill, saying he was opposed to "congressional micromanagement of foreign policy," he announced as a compromise that he would grant the students many of the same protections the bill offered.
In Washington, a prominent group of foreign policy thinkers is gently pushing for compromise.
