Post-Cold War Era Quotes

After the end of the cold war, everybody thought, fantastic, finally the UN may be able to do what it was originally set up to do without big power divisions. It would be easy to get them to come together to resolve things. You will recall, on the first Gulf war, you almost got a unanimous resolution and a very solid coalition.

I think, a general anxiety, after the end of the Cold War, to find a new basis for affirming American nationhood. And perhaps another, in plainer terms, is the lure of the approaching Abraham Lincoln bicentennial has been made a resurgence in interest in Lincoln.

I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.

The peace dividend is peace.

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.

The people in East Germany have lived through so many changes in the last 15 years like never before in the country, and they did this often with great enthusiasm. But in the West we also have a high degree of transformations.

[Mikhail] Gorbachev said that he would agree to the unification of Germany, and even adherence of Germany to NATO, which was quite a concession, if NATO didn't move to East Germany. And [George] Bush and [James] Baker promised verbally, that's critical, verbally that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east," which meant East Germany. Nobody was talking about anything farther at the time. They would not expand one inch to the east. Now that was a verbal promise. It was never written. NATO immediately expanded to East Germany.

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.

And then '74 as I mentioned and then the 1990 world cup was our team was the team of the reunification you know, so we were the team for both sides of Germany so now, you know throughout the last 16 years, we've melted together. And now comes the next milestone.

In general I saw my job as the first president whose full term would be served after the Cold War in a global information society where we were interdependent but not integrated. And therefore, we were vulnerable to the worst, and able to seize the best, of what's going on in the world.

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.

Since the end of the Cold War, peace, prosperity, and progress have largely been the order of the day for hundreds of millions of people in the Americas, but not for the people of Cuba.

After the Cold War, to rally the American people to understand that we had to be a part of solutions. It's one thing to say that we have to run everything, it's another to say we don't want anything to do with it.

The Cold War is over. And our focus has got to be on intelligence, increased manpower, fighting internationally targets.

Back in 2007, many people criticized me for my talk at the Munich Security Conference. But what did I say there? I merely pointed out that the former NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner had guaranteed that NATO would not expand eastwards after the fall of the Wall.

There used to be the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. There used to be Soviet troops in the GDR. And we must honestly admit that they were occupation troops, which remained in Germany after WWII under the guise of allied troops. Now these occupation troops are gone, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact is no more. There is no Soviet threat, but NATO and U.S. troops are still in Europe. What for?

The West as a whole in the early 1990s become obsessed with a 'peace dividend' that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and sometimes soft-headed causes. Politicians forget that the only real peace dividend is peace.

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

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

Music, for me, was something I did because I was disillusioned after the Cold War's end and did not know what I wanted in life.

Europeans are greater than they have been since any time since the end of the Cold War.