John Negroponte Quotes

There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

I supported the efforts in Honduras to stop the flow of arms from Nicaragua across to El Salvador.

Honduras is strongly anti-Communist, maintains no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and has provided vital support for United States-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.

The Sandinistas are a tough bunch of guys, with a fabulous amount of Soviet Bloc equipment and Soviet Bloc advisers.

During the Reagan Administration, so much attention was devoted to fighting Marxism in Nicaragua and El Salvador that Washington lost sight of longer-term challenges in other countries.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

I always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy.

The Soviet Union is a first rate military power and a fourth rate economic power.

Russia is now a lonely fraction of what the old Warsaw pact was. It not only has lost its old Eastern European allies; those allies are now arrayed on the other side, as members of NATO

The external Soviet empire lasted 45 years. It is shattered, beyond redemption or repair.

If we can deter the Soviet Union, if we can deter North Korea, why on earth can't we deter Iran?

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

When you think of the Cold War, there are various places where you imagine espionage. Espionage crossroads of the Cold War bring you to the backstreets of Berlin, or Vienna.

Bin Laden's role in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s had made him a hero around the Middle East.

When I was young, I always wanted to go to Russia.

After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.

The Ukraine has a long history of either being part of the Soviet Union or within that sphere.

For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

Too many countries of the former Soviet bloc remain under the control of authoritarian leaders, including some, like the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who have learned how to maintain a more convincing facade of elections than their communist predecessors.

World War II and the ensuing Cold War compelled the United States to develop a sustained commitment to Western Europe and the Far East.

Was the Soviet Union reformable? I would say no. They said, 'Okay, the Soviet Union isn't working.' They would say, 'No, it's great. We just need democracy, political pluralism, private property.' And then there was no Soviet Union. The European Union is the same.

Ronald Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Iron Curtain by showing strength and resolutely standing up to the Soviet Union. President Trump needs to be similarly resolute towards Putin.

In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.

Now that we are used to globalisation it's hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if 'the Russians love their children too.'