Elliott Abrams Quotes

It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.'

My feeling is that it's a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan defeated Soviet communism without firing a shot.

Ronald Reagan's era can be defined, number one in most people's minds, by the Cold War and by the end of it - and by the strong principles he stood for.

Reagan's defense buildup and SDI, so ridiculed at the time, pressed Gorbachev, while his economy was collapsing, to make arms deals and improve relations with the West, which contributed to the unraveling of his empire.

Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Without Jimmy Carter we might not have gotten Ronald Reagan, without Ronald Reagan there would probably still be a Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan will be remembered for leading the United States during a time of tremendous international transition - the demise of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did as much to win the Cold War as anyone…. The idea that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War is ludicrous.

Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.

They said Reagan was too dangerous. It was Reagan who ended the Soviet Union without firing a shot.

If you read history, right, if you read [Mikhail] Gorbachev's memoirs, Gorbachev memoirs said the key thing in winning the Cold War was our insistence on nuclear defense, because they knew they couldn't match us.

I think the best president - because he changed the whole mood of the country, the whole economy of the country, and stood up to Communism... that was continuing its causes around the world, and backed them off and caused them to collapse - and that was Ronald Reagan.

At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.

Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.

I wouldn't even go into the history of the last days of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal from Europe, and what promises were given at that time, because those were oral promises, and our leaders of that time strongly believe that, like in ancient Russia, a word given is better than any treaty.

Carter's hopes died when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and he ended up having to reverse policy and launch the military buildup that Reagan continued. Mr. Obama would be forced back into a war on terror if terrorist groups pull off enough damaging or frightening attacks to force this issue to the fore.

Ronald Reagan in foreign affairs, I think, was someone who had certain, very general ideas, general propositions by which he lives: To combat communism, to build up the American military power to assure our national security against any conceivable threat.

President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.

There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

Reagan was a pure liberation, free-and-fair election American.

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

Whether history will view Ronald Reagan as a great president depends, more than anything else, on one question: how much credit does he deserve for the fact that the Cold War ended far earlier than almost anyone suspected - and on terms that Americans had fantasized about for 45 years?