Geopolitical Competition Quotes

I believe some of the tensions the U.S. has had with Russia and that the Europeans have had with Russia... China is taking advantage of some of those dealings.

Russia and China deride western democracy and deploy both hard and soft power to promote their alternative models of political development.

Globalization, far from putting an end to power diplomacy between States, has, on the contrary, intensified it.

It's not possible for two countries to be the leading dominant political power at the same time.

The neoconservative doctrine declares that it is the principal goal of U.S. foreign policy to prevent the rise of any country that would have sufficient power to serve as a check on American unilateralism. This neoconservative doctrine puts Russia and China in Washington's crosshairs.

The starting point for understanding the deterioration in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia lies in Washington rather than Moscow. After 1989, Russia was a defeated power. Despite the fine words and some limited gestures, the Americans have treated it like one. Their policy has been one of encirclement.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.

It was designed to have an impact on the stalemate over Mutually Assured Destruction with the Soviet Union. 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.

Whenever, and from whatever causes, it might happen; and happen it would, that any one of these nations or confederacies should rise on the scale of political importance much above the degree of their neighbors, that moment would those neighbors behold her with envy and fear.

NASA was invented as a response to Cold War steps. There are those who presumed that we went to the moon because we're explorers. We went to the moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. And so when it became clear that they (Soviet Union) were not going to the moon, we're done with the moon.

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

More often than not, Americans and Westerners overestimated the power and capability of the Soviet Union.

The communists have lost the cold war, but the west has not yet won it.

I don't trust any country that looks around a continent and says, "Hey, I'll take the frozen part."

In Russian foreign policy, nationalism -- patriotism -- is defined as opposition to the West.

They [China] have indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

Reagan "has conducted an arms race on earth," boomed Mondale. A race generally implies two parties. The Soviets contributed a little bit to this problem, if Mondale had not noticed.

The best way to contain China and make it the peaceful rise of China is for us to have an enormously robust navy that is the greatest navy in the world, that can patrol two oceans, that can fight two or three wars, and China will not challenge us because the Chinese are practical.

Challenging American leadership is not at stake.

The object of China's strategy is inexorably to supplant the United States as the world's premier economic power, and if necessary, to defeat us militarily.

So many dictators trying to blackmail the free world because they have no way to compete on ideas, innovation or creativity. The Cold War was two competing visions of the future. I was always anti-communist but it was an idea at least, an alternative idea. We do not have a competing vision for the future because the ideals of these dictators are in the past. They are time travellers. They need confrontation and destruction to survive. The problem is, many people in the free world are sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

The Russians and the Chinese have been making enormous investments in the military. We have the smallest Navy since 1916. We have the lowest number of troops since the end of the Second World War. We've got to work with Congress, and Donald Trump will, to rebuild our military and project American strength in the world.

America is the one that leads the effort to make sure the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea is protected.

There are some people who think that at some time in the future, China may challenge us for supremacy in the Pacific, and therefore, what do we do today to prevent that? And you, of course, will say that we will try to thwart any economic progress in China. If we engaged in such a policy, we would turn a billion-plus people into nationalist opponents of the United States.

The Government should take a firm, bold line. This delay - this uncertainty, by which, abroad, we are losing our prestige and our position, while Russia is advancing and will be before Constantinople in no time! Then the Government will be fearfully blamed and the Queen so humiliated that she thinks she would abdicate at once.