Kathleen Troia McFarland Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.'

All Americans and freedom-loving people around the world owe President Reagan our deepest gratitude for his strong, principled leadership that ended the Cold War and brought freedom to millions of people.

It is not in the interest of the German people or in the interest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or a partner in a military struggle for power between the East and the West.

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

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.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.

The malaise and military decline of the post-Vietnam years under President Jimmy Carter set the stage for Russian aggression abroad and uncertainty among our allies.

The world is undoubtedly a safer, freer place because Thatcher - like Reagan - refused to back down when it came to defending freedom.

The United States and Russia probably do not have common aims and dreams, but they have common worries: Both Washington and Moscow are concerned about the rise of China and are threatened by the rise of radical Islam.

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

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.

This is an era of violent peace.

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.

For any rational political leader, war is indeed unthinkable, but two huge military bureaucracies in the two countries [Russia and America] are paid to think about it every day, to plan for it, and to develop scenarios for "winning." The madness of one bureaucracy sustains the other. The technological nightmare into which we have entered is an environment that chokes rational thought.

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

We have never practiced the policy of competitive armaments.

The basic reason Russia has not attacked us is that we can outproduce her.

I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to.

A missile is a missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.

The engagement policy of détente made the United States number two in a world where it is dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best

Dwight Eisenhower… supported the nuclearization of the military and the militarization of nuclear weapons as a cost saving way of deterring the Soviets. Under Eisenhower, custody or nuclear weapons shifted from the civilian Atomic Energy Commission to the military.