David K. E. Bruce Quotes

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

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.

The United States is as weak as the Soviet Union. If enough pressure is applied to them, they will pull out of the Middle East.

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

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Graham Greene, as I understand it, was quite outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy.

[John] Foster Dulles is the only case I know of a bull who carries his china shop with him.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

Adlai the appeaser ... who got a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment.

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…

My last words to you, my son and successor, are: Never trust the Russians!

It has become increasingly clear that Pakistan’s chief aim in aligning with the West was to gain support against India

… 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.

Our opposition to Communist expansion is not an absolute factor; containment must be taken in relation to American security and American objectives.

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

When I came to Congress in 1993, the traditional idea that all politics stopped at the water's edge was alive and well. Americans had been unified for the previous four decades against the threat from the former Soviet Union and communism.

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

Both World War II and the subsequent Cold War gave America's involvement in world affairs a clear focus. The objectives of foreign policy were relatively easy to define, and they could be imbued with high moral content.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.

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.

President Nixon was a pragmatic strategist. He would engage, not contain, China, but he would also quietly set pieces into place for a fallback position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen.

Nineteen-seventy-nine had been a year of American setbacks around the globe. Before the year began, Cuban troops were already roaming Angola, and a pro-Communist regime ruled Ethiopia.

I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest.

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

Furthermore, it is not distorting history to say that it was largely through the efforts and propaganda of our International Federation that the government of the U.S.S.R. was recognized by the majority of the great powers.