Bernard Lewis Quotes

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

I think NATO is a Cold War product. I think NATO historically should have shut up shop in 1990 along with the Warsaw Pact; unfortunately, it didn't.

All countries in my part of the world, we want democracy to prevail. I told the people, 'If you want American policies to stop, we need to take action.' We need to make the U.S. understand that its meddling is inappropriate.

I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

The opportunities that Gorbachev created for international relations have also been missed, perhaps even lost - here, however, primarily because of the United States.

I don't put any dates on these things. I don't say what is going to happen in one year, five years, ten years, but I am confident that the trend toward freedom in the Communist world is a basic truth.

If we look at where relations between the Soviet Union and Germany were in 1945 and where we stand now, then we have achieved so much.

It is totally unacceptable for a government to interfere in the internal affairs of another government and send aid, money, and weapons, to the people who are against a certain regime in another country.

I'll tell you what the danger is for Europe. It's carrying out a cold war against Russia and pushing Russia into China's arms. That's the threat to Europe.

Nixon tried to wrap the Soviet Union into a web of agreements that would constrain its behavior. What happened is that many people lost faith in that approach, not the least because of how the Soviets handled it.

Of late, attempts have been made in the USA - at a high level and in a rather cynical form - to play the "Chinese card" against the USSR. This is a shortsighted and dangerous policy.

... it's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root; F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.

We've just let too many things happen. And now, try to turn around and fix it. Getting involved in a [Syria] civil war directly was never something I thought made sense.

I believe that if we had would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.

You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union, but we made a lot of mistakes, we supported really nasty guys, we did some things that we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia, but we did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That was our objective. We achieved it.

The Cold War has ended. It's very simple. We are no longer living in a bipolar world. The chances that we will go to war with Russia are pretty much ended. Mutually Assured Destruction was a doctrine that worked very well for decades as a deterrent, but the world has fundamentally changed.

We've been in a period of relative stability and cooperation since the end of the Cold War among the world's major powers, but that may not always exist. And certainly one could even predict that there will be periods of hostility or tension ahead.

The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

The Cold War began with the division of Europe. It can only end when Europe is whole.

I do think that when we're looking at Putin's actions, we really need to look further into what his point is. Because I think there is a misconception that this is kind of reigniting the Cold War and Putin's a bully. And he's just, you know, sort of lashing out at Ukraine when actually I think that this goes much deeper to that.

If Berlin fell, the US would lose Europe, and if Europe fell into the hands of the Soviet Union and thus added its great industrial plant to the USSR's already great industrial plant, the United States would be reduced to the character of a garrison state if it were to survive at all.

The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border of Afghanistan, I wrote to President Jimmy Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.