Warsaw Pact Quotes

On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them: 'You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.'

People nowadays don't know about the Cold War and the U.S.'s old rivalry with the U.S.S.R.

I can recall photographs of Comrade Ulbricht being embraced by Comrade Brezhnev, which must have been like putting your arms around Grant's Tomb.

I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.

So seven new countries, three of them formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the others part of the Warsaw Pact, will become full members of NATO next year.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

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.

It's a different outlook, and one that I understand. When you are a former member of the Warsaw Pact, when you have lived behind the Berlin Wall, when you have experienced the communist systems that existed in these countries, for them, the West represents hope.

Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.

We have said, and we will always say again, that we are opposed to the intervention of foreign military forces. But which was the lesser evil? Chaos, civil war, counter-revolution, and a new world war, or an intervention by Soviet troops? ... I say clearly that the first alternative was the worst thing that could have occurred, and the second, the intervention of Soviet troops, was a necessary evil.

We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? … We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. .... This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism.

The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.

Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now."

Leonid Breznev was an old man and despite his own military experience in World War II, he on the other hand was not very close to the military.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The Polish freedom movement of 1968 lost its confrontation with police violence; the Prague Spring was crushed by the armies of five Warsaw Pact members. But in both countries, 1968 gave birth to a new political consciousness.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.

There can be no justification to admit, in any way, the use of armed forced to intervene in the internal affairs of a WTO [Warsaw Treaty Organization] member country. The solving of domestic problems belongs exclusively to the Party and people of each country and any kind of interference can only do harm to the cause of socialism, friendship and collaboration among the socialist countries.

Right at the beginning of all of this [Ukraine to join NATO], serious senior statesmen, people like [George] Kennan for example and others warned that the expansion of NATO to the east is going to cause a disaster. I mean, it's like having the Warsaw Pact on the Mexican border. It's inconceivable. And others, senior people warned about this, but policymakers didn't care. Just go ahead.

Russia is now a lonely fraction of what the old Warsaw pact was. It not only has lost its old Eastern European allies; those allies are now arrayed on the other side, as members of NATO

The Cold War is Over

For fifty years, we heard NATO is necessary to save Western Europe from the Russian hordes, you know the slave state, stuff I was taking about. In 1990-91, no Russian hordes. Okay, what happens? Well there are actually visions of the future system that were presented. One was [Mikhail] Gorbachev. He called for a Eurasian security system, with no military blocs. He called it a Common European Home. No military blocs, no Warsaw Pact. Just an integrated security system with no conflicts.Now the other vision was presented by George Bush, this is the "statesman".