Stephen Kinzer Quotes

People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.

So you're quite right that when... as the Cold War grew and expanded out of Europe, we ourselves had to take refuge behind the shield of the Monroe Doctrine.

The United States has dealt with the Middle East and surrounding regions for many decades in the context of the Cold War.

We in the United States are aware of the vital importance of the struggle in Indochina to the cause of the free world

The Cold War is over. The world has become much more complicated.

The Cold War didn't end. It was won.

Over the years, there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin.

Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.

The international order established at the end of World War II could certainly have been worse. However, this order did contain certain factors which bore within them the seeds of instability.

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.

Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.

Moreover, the accomplishment of Russia's aims has been greatly simplified by the fact that we have heretofore offered the world no practical antidote for the Russian poison.

The United States does not believe in durable coexistence with a moral threat.

… this whole Near East problem is not just an Arab-Israeli dispute but a problem of the influence of the West as opposed to that of the Soviet. We want no wars, but we do not want a Sovietized world.

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

The only thing that kept the Cold War cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons.

The United States and Russia probably do not have common aims and dreams, but they have common worries: Both Washington and Moscow are concerned about the rise of China and are threatened by the rise of radical Islam.

Other than being crazy enough to press a button, there is nothing that Putin can do militarily to fundamentally alter American interests.

Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.

The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.

During the Cold War, the non-aligned movement tried to become a 'third force' in world politics, but failed because it was too large and unwieldy.