Ivan Krastev Quotes

The E.U. cannot act as guardian of the post-Cold War status quo without risking a collapse of Europe's current institutional infrastructure.

Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War.

When Mitt Romney talked about Putin expanding his sphere of influence, Obama mocked and said, 'The Cold War has been over 20 years, nothing to be worried about'... We keep making that mistake with Putin.

Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia's reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states.

Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.

Since the end of the Cold War, hegemonism has become increasingly unpopular.

Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.

So you're quite right that when... as the Cold War grew and expanded out of Europe, we ourselves had to take refuge behind the shield of the Monroe Doctrine.

Hard men present hard choices - none more so than Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.

The wars in Georgia and Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea have represented, in part, Russia's answer to its perceived exclusion from the post-Cold War European Security Order.

The Russian entry will prevent the Nazi domination of Europe… I do not think that there is any danger of Russian domination of Europe.

An economic version of mutual deterrence is preserving the uneasy status quo between China and Japan.

It looks like the so-called "winners" of the Cold War are determined to have it all, and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone.

Russia and China completely disagree with the international order that was established after World War II, and they're trying to take it apart right before our eyes.

Most of the conversation about how geopolitics is changing in the 21st century focuses on the shift from west to east and on how we're moving from the bipolar power equation of the Cold War to a new bipolar relationship, that of the U.S. and China, that determines the mood music for everyone else.

At the end of the Cold War, the prevailing view in Washington was that the U.S. was strong, and Russia was weak and did not count in a unipolar world. We disregarded Russia's opposition to NATO expansion, the Iraq War, and the U.S.-led military intervention in Serbia for the independence of Kosovo.

For Mr. Putin, vacillation invites aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

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.

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.

I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too.

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

During the Cold War, America took sides not only in disputes between Arab countries, but also in debates within them.