Timothy Garton Ash Quotes

In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world.

European intellectuals and Islamic radicals are in a kind of dark alliance to portray the United States as negatively as possible.

It is not a winning game for Europeans to have a hostility to the United States.

The lesson of this century is that Europe will only be peaceful if the Americans are on this continent.

The tragedy of 9/11 galvanised the American superpower into action, leaving us in Europe divided in its wake.

There is an enormous difference between Russia and Western Europe.

A quarter-century after the end of the Vietnam War, and eleven years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, it has become commonplace to say that we Americans have no consensus on foreign policy. Across the political spectrum, left or right, most Americans still cling to whatever assumptions they held during our long journey through the Cold War.

Democrats couldn't care less if people in Indiana hate them. But if Europeans curl their lips, liberals can't look at themselves in the mirror.

The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia.

It is impossible to exaggerate the wide, and widening, gulf between the American attitude on the Iraq war and the view from our friends across the Atlantic.

You can’t entrust your purse to Europe and the security to America

In the event of a victory over Germany by Soviet Russia and England, Bolshevism in Europe would inevitably follow. Under these circumstances I would prefer to see Germany win the war. I feel that an understanding could be reached (with Germany) which would result in a lasting peace with Europe and believe that a German victory is preferable to a British and Soviet victory.

American politics is not, as is that of Europe, "a prelude to civil war"; it cannot become either entirely irresponsible or entirely dogmatic; and it must not try to be logical. It is a rocking sea of checks and balances in which uncompromising absolutes must drown.

America must never accept as a final fact the division between East and West …

Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster…

Pat Buchanan likes to say we're in a culture war. The Civil War was a culture war, and brothers killed brothers. I wonder if they avoided dinner conversation about politics. What if this culture war turned into a real war? I'd look back on that dinner and wish that I'd ordered a side of argument

The separation of the West from the United States is inevitable

At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.

Europe’s slow political decline has been disguised for decades by American power.

The threat to Europe is for us to push Russia into China’s arms.

While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st.

Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don't understand it. It's like America has lost faith in rational thought.

I think 'The East' is political.

There are trends in our societies... that can lead to some political decisions in America and in Europe that can give some ground to the radicalization discourse.

I doubt that America will come to Europe again. You'll be on your own against militant Islam.