Eliot A. Cohen Quotes
World War III was the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. Like the Cold War, this "world war" against militant Islam is, in fact, global;... will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts;... will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers;... may go on for a long time; and... has ideological roots. Afghanistan is just one front in World War IV.
Eliot A. Cohen, Historian, Op Ed, Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2001
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was thrown out of the Labour Party for his pro Cold War and Soviet statements.
This fact was one of the reasons that McCarthyism and HUAC were able to get traction. The Red Scare paranoids found something to really worry about. They overreacted, sensing the problem not as one of a large number of misguided and naïve people trying to help America do better, but as active spies controlled by the Kremlin who wanted to destroy the American way of life. There were two basic reasons these naïve officials acted that way. Many of them had not forgotten the devastation of the American people in the Great Depression and believed that capitalism had almost failed completely and the rough edge had to be taken off American capitalism by injecting some socialist principles such as stronger labor unions, ending racial and religious discrimination, controlling monopolies, and regulating critical industries. They also were mindful of the fact that the Russians were bearing the brunt of the WWII casualties—military and civilian—while killing more of the Germans and capturing more German occupied territory than the other allies together, yet they were not receiving the same level of assistance—technical, intelligence, economic and political as the British. They saw helping the Russians as saving American lives on the battlefield by making them more effective and keeping German soldiers and weapons away from the Western front and Americans. They also remembered that many in Congress were opposed to our entering WWII in Europe until Germany declared war on America. They had in many cases been apologists for Fascism and passionate enemies of communism. Some American industrialists like Henry Ford were anti-Semitic and overt admirers of Hitler. {586985} So these officials tried to redress the imbalance that existed while at the same time little was really known about Soviet Russia and the Stalin excesses that were as bad as some of Hitler’s. {634969} The only information Americans had were the terrible casualties the Russians were taking and the in kind that they were dishing out to the Germans. The number of Soviet spies in America were few and commensurate with the number of agents we had in Russia. But few Americans realized the difficulty the U. S. and the rest of the democratic world would have with Russia after the war was won.
Eliot Asher Cohen is an American political scientist. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. In 2019, Cohen was named the 9th Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding the former dean, Vali Nasr. Before his time as dean, he directed the Strategic Studies Program at SAIS. Cohen "is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field", according to international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
