Nato Cold War Quotes

People say ‘third world’ and think it just means countries without internet or paved roads,” I say. “But ‘third world’ is Cold War terminology. NATO countries are the first world and the Communist bloc is the second world. The third world was where those two clashed. So the mess in Afghanistan is actually a first and second world problem.

The mutual trust that emerged with the end of the Cold War was severely shaken a few years later by NATO's decision to expand to the east. Russia had no option but to draw its own conclusions from that.

In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the "free world" and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own security. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries. In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren't Super and don't like each other terribly much.

Although much has been written of the exploits of Canadians who answered the call to arms in World Wars I and II, nothing has been written about the young men who flocked to join the Cold War. Thanks to Canada's menacing presence, Russia has never invaded Germany. The author menaced Russia, as a fighter pilot based in NATO Europe during the 1950s. Much of the material herein is derived from his diaries of that period. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Accounts have been embellished. No harm or libel is intended. The harm is to the author's self-image. The diaries reveal that he was brash and intolerant. He considers it one of life's miracles that his friends put up with him.

The pro-European revolution in Ukraine, which broke out a quarter century after the end of the Cold War, took a page from the Cold War fascination with the European West shared by the dissidents of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries of the region, in some cases turning that fascination into a new national religion. The Revolution of Dignity and the war brought about a geopolitical reorientation of Ukrainian society. The proportion of those with positive attitudes toward Russia decreased from 80 percent in January 2014 to under 50 percent in September of the same year. In November 2014, 64 percent of those polled supported Ukraine’s accession to the European Union (that figure had stood at 39 percent in November 2013). In April 2014, only a third of Ukrainians had wanted their country to join NATO; in November 2014, more than half supported that course. There can be little doubt that the experience of war not only united most Ukrainians but also turned the country’s sympathies westward.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy was framed by his hostility to Western democratic leaders and a bizarre attraction to former KGB agent and current Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump let pass no opportunity to undermine NATO, a bulwark against Russian aggression since its founding. Trump also, in effect, ceded Syria to Putin, giving Russia its first beachhead in the Middle East since 1973. And his constant attacks on America’s most faithful ally during the Cold War, Germany, led to the American president playing into Russia’s hands again by withdrawing troops from the country. While Trump’s “America First” theme initially struck a nerve with voters, his ignorance of history and lack of diplomatic skill prevented

Our close alliances are strained as never before. A frazzled NATO feels the eager heat of Russia’s breath in the east, with the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany wondering if we’re about to see a new Cold War, only this time with the United States more friendly to Russia than to the West. America’s role as a NATO ally will continue to degrade as Trump’s bromance with Putin, his extortion of the allies, and his utter ignorance of the traditions and meaning of the Western Alliance is demonstrated time and again. But hey, Trump Tower Moscow will make it worthwhile, right?

And George Kennan, at the age of ninety-three, warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” He feared it could be the beginning of a new cold war, and in this he was prophetic. Kennan knew that empires do not vanish into thin air.

demonstrations in Moscow prior to Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 unnerved Putin, in Obama's view, to the point where he believed “he was losing control.” Putin quickly infused his administration with an “anti-American and anti-Western,…proto-Russian nationalist, almost czarist” attitude, which improved his political position at home but complicated his foreign policy, especially his dealings with the United States. It also put Moscow on edge, Putin insiders looking anxiously over their shoulders, concocting Western conspiracies, imagining NATO threats.

example, consider the opinions of Robert Gates, who served as director of the CIA before becoming secretary of defense for both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During the cold war, he was a hard-liner; now he is in Gorbachev's corner on the 1991 controversy. “They [the Russians] believed they had a commitment that we wouldn't try and move NATO to the East,” Gates told the Council on Foreign Relations. And

clearly had a more limited objective. Putin wanted to protect Russia from “NATO expansion.” In fact, Kissinger believed, the West was as responsible as Russia for the Ukraine crisis, a position radically at odds with the conventional wisdom in Washington.

The name “Charlie,” though it would become quite catchy to fans of spy novels and films over the years, had a more prosaic backstory. The Allied checkpoints covering entry into East Germany, and then into Berlin, derived their names, simply, from the letters in the NATO phonetic alphabet

Back in Bonn, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and in London, events in Berlin were taking everyone by surprise.

If there was a single point at which the Cold War ended, it was probably this, the moment when Gorbachev acceded to German unification within NATO.

The United States was an empire not for the purpose of subjugation or exploitation, but for the aspiration of advancing the expressly articulated ideals of the United Nations, the Atlantic Charter, and NATO: namely, the right of nations to stand free from outside coercion or subversion of peoples to chart their own destiny.

Putin’s lurch to war, disastrous for Russia as well as for Ukraine, is unjustifiable. But it was not unprovoked. NATO enlargement has been an aggressive operation and Moscow has always been in its sights. In calling for a stable settlement of military borders, the Kremlin has a good case. From its foundation in 1949, NATO was always an offensive, not a defensive, enterprise, whose ultimate objective in American eyes was the restoration of a normal capitalism in the Soviet bloc.

All maritime nations have vital interests beyond their borders. All maritime nations, then, to the extent that they project power over an international commons, are empires. But the degree of that projection, its character and the actual motives animating it, matter. The United States was an empire not for the purpose of subjugation or exploitation, but for the aspiration of advancing the expressly articulated ideals of the United Nations, the Atlantic Charter, and NATO: namely, the right of nations to stand free from outside coercion or subversion of peoples to chart their own destiny.

For the siloviki—Russian military and intelligence officials—the NATO campaign in Serbia confirmed their theory about American imperial intentions. In their view, little had changed since the Cold War era, except that Russia was much weaker in 1999 and therefore lacked the means to counter American military aggression. The proper response, therefore, was not to kiss and make up, as the naive, aging Yeltsin opted to do, but to rebuild Russian military forces. One of the intelligence officers who held this view was Vladimir Putin. The following year, he became president.

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.

During a trip to the United Kingdom in March 2000, Acting President Putin seemed eager to demonstrate his Western orientation, hinting in an interview at the possibility of closer cooperation between Europe and Russia and even NATO and Russia. “Russia is part of the European culture,” he explained. “And I cannot imagine my country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as the enemy.” When asked point-blank if Russia might join NATO, Putin replied, “I don’t see why not. I would not rule out such a possibility.