Geopolitical Manipulation Quotes

It should come as no surprise that Russia continues its effort to manipulate Western democracies in a way to sow discord and disagreements between our countries in NATO and within the United States or any other Western European country. And it's something the United States obviously must be on guard against.

The more fundamentalists they get us in Afghanistan the better it is for us because they will kill more communists.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

The American president increasingly used his influence to create conflicts, intensify existing conflicts, and, above all, to keep conflicts from being resolved peacefully. For years this man looked for a dispute anywhere in the world, but preferably in Europe, that he could use to create political entanglements with American economic obligations to one of the contending sides, which would then steadily involve America in the conflict and thus divert attention from his own confused domestic economic policies.

First Russians objective was - as I said earlier - to sow discord, discontent, disruption. And their next objective was - because of the very strong personal animus that Putin himself had for both Clintons, both President Clinton and Secretary Clinton - and he particularly held her responsible for what he felt was an attempted color revolution in 2011 to attempt to overturn him. So, he had very strong hatred - personal hatred - towards her, and that kind of led him to - if I'm opposed to her, who am I going to favor?

...the plan is to engineer events, real and staged, that will create enormous fear in the countdown years to 2012. This includes a plan to start a third world war either by stimulating the Muslim world into a "holy war" against the West or by using the Chinese to cause global conflict. Maybe both.

Russia demanded Armenian territories, very cleverly using long-standing, bitter fights between Armenians and Turks.

There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific.

I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chessboard of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain.

[Russians would like to] undermine the West and its institutions, create doubts about NATO, create doubts about the European Union, support nationalists on the right just as the Soviet communists supported communists on the left. Weaken the West in general and create an atmosphere in which we're uncertain about ourselves.

This murder of Hariri was deliberately planned and executed precisely to implicate Syria and to set in train the events which have unfolded.

I think that Putin's strategy has been throwing a lot of money, fairly haphazardly, at a lot of projects aimed at disrupting Western relations and undermining trust in democracies. They may have gotten farther in the States than anywhere else.

You look at what the world is doing to us at every level, whether it's militarily, or in trade, or in so many other levels, the world is taking advantage of the United States and it's driving us into literally being a third world nation.

The Russians are using the tools at their disposal to weaken Western solidarity, to create doubt, to support nationalist parties, just as the old Soviets supported leftist parties. We need a united Western response to this multi-pronged threat.