Chuck Fleischmann Quotes

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

We are running out of enemies. We are down to Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung.

… this whole Near East problem is not just an Arab-Israeli dispute but a problem of the influence of the West as opposed to that of the Soviet. We want no wars, but we do not want a Sovietized world.

The Cold War didn't end. It was won.

People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.

Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.

The United States has dealt with the Middle East and surrounding regions for many decades in the context of the Cold War.

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

We will always apply the same principles of collective security, prudent caution, and superior weaponry that enabled us to peacefully prevail in the long cold war against the Soviet Union.

The Cold War is Over

The Mutual Security Act was intended not to fight a war but to prevent a war.

I built a nuclear option to get peace, not to have bombs. Our enemies learned that they could not destroy us.

U. S. foreign policy in the 20th century was characterized by disastrous oscillations between over-commitment and isolation

Both World War II and the subsequent Cold War gave America's involvement in world affairs a clear focus. The objectives of foreign policy were relatively easy to define, and they could be imbued with high moral content.

The Cold War has ended for America.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.

I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.

And, gentlemen, they have not yet done so, and it is quite clear that no Americans, no people in the world probably, are going to war with the Soviet Union.

President Nixon was a pragmatic strategist. He would engage, not contain, China, but he would also quietly set pieces into place for a fallback position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen.

Nineteen-seventy-nine had been a year of American setbacks around the globe. Before the year began, Cuban troops were already roaming Angola, and a pro-Communist regime ruled Ethiopia.

It's Russia some people would like to get rid of. They are still afraid of our nuclear deterrent. We have our own foreign policy whether they like it or not.

I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest.

For the Kremlin, it is more feasible to preserve its great-power status in cooperation with the United States than in confrontation.

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

I told him that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words.