Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes

Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two things to justify their admiration: an opening to China - 'rapprochement' - and improved relations with the Soviet Union - detente - which included SALT, a historic arms-limitation treaty.

What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.

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

I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.

The USSR has emerged from the war in the role of one of most authoritative powers in world. It is now impossible to solve serious questions of international relations without participation of USSR.

The core of detente [with Russia] is the reduction in arms.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

The Cold War is Over

Ronald Reagan thundered against Soviet perfidy for the television cameras … the substantive measures he took against the Soviets were remarkably modest.

Russia is an important power upon which the U.S.A. imposed a Cold War.

Without Kissinger's work in the Middle East, with Sadat especially, I doubt if the Camp David Agreements five years later would have happened. His achievements over detente, the seeds of trust he sowed in a very distrustful and hostile Moscow, helped over a long period.

Detente - isn't that what a farmer has with his turkey - until Thanksgiving?

Ronald Reagan was one of our great foreign policy Presidents. He did not come from the Senate. He did not come from the foreign policy world. He was a governor, but his resolve, his clarity of purpose, his intelligence, his capacity to deal with complex issues and solve tough problems served him extremely well, and if I were elected President, I hope I could rely upon those same qualities.

And, gentlemen, they have not yet done so, and it is quite clear that no Americans, no people in the world probably, are going to war with the Soviet Union.

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.

Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.

The world would be better off with multiple superpowers. When Communist USSR was a superpower, the world was better off.

In the post war period I began again to have my doubts about Russian policy.

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.

Even during the years of the Cold War, the intense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we always avoided any direct clash between our civilians and, most certainly, between our military.

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

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.

In 1983, all of us had U.S. passports, but because there was so much tension between America and the U.S.S.R., we were announced as a Canadian group.