George H. W. Bush Quotes

President Trump say that relations between the United States and Russia may be at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

I think Russia is dangerous, not a superpower. I know what the president is trying to say. I worked for him for five years, not just two.He doesn't want us to overreact. He doesn't want to go back to the Cold War and some superpower competition. But my own view, and I think General Mattis stated something similar today, is that Russia is a challenge for the United States. It is a threat to some of our allies.

If Russia and the United States approach each other in starkly adversarial terms, the conflict will badly warp the foreign policy of both countries ...

Anybody who says it is in America's interest to not have better relations with Russia doesn't know what they're talking about when it comes to geopolitics.

America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia.

You've got to remember the Cold War was a very real thing then, so the relationship with the United States was very, very important. As was the relationship that I was developing with China: that was something I did very much. And they weren't conflicting things.

We are seeking to avoid a new Cold War, avoid a new arms race, and, therefore, we continue to work for a more constructive relationship with Russia, including political dialogue with Russia.

For the Kremlin, it is more feasible to preserve its great-power status in cooperation with the United States than in confrontation.

Of course the United States and Russia have different interests. Nevertheless, both are strategic partners.

That's the problem with Russia: The world has changed. Europe is not at war, and no one wants to negotiate with us. The world has changed, but Russia prefers to pretend it has not.

We shouldn't overdramatize the current disagreements with the Russians. They are real, but they're not really all that threatening. And the notion that we're moving back to some Cold War I think is really an exaggerated judgment.

I believe that we are going to get along very well with him [Josef Stalin] and the Russian people - very well indeed.

It's worth remembering George W. Bush, Barack Obama also came in thinking they had the magic key to better, warmer relations with Russia; those efforts ended in tears.

Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria, to refute the rhetoric of the Cold War and to accept the obvious fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs. Like other countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.

It would be much easier for me to be so tough - the tougher I am on Russia, the better. But you know what? I want to do the right thing for the American people. And to be honest, secondarily, I want to do the right thing for the world. If Russia and the United States actually got together and got along - and don't forget, we're a very powerful nuclear country and so are they. There's no up-side.

Russia is a difficult country to deal with, but I think that American policy on Russia has been foolish in the extreme.

Prospects of normalizing our relations with Russia look good.

There's a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, 'Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don't have to worry about these guys again.' We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, and we have to be well-informed.

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.

President Obama hasn't been elected by the American people in order to be pleasant to Russia.

Many in China find it perplexing that the U.S. and Russian perceptions are still so heavily influenced by the Cold War.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

You should never make alliances with a decadent nation like France and a semi-barbarous nation like Russia

It’s not in our interest to drive the Russians into a beleaguered attitude where they have to prove what they can do.

Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.