It’s important to credit the brave people that take chances to stand up to regimes. They’re the star.
I think freedom for Palestine could be an incredible source of hope to people struggling all over the world. I think it could also be an incredible inspiration to Arab people in the Middle East, who are struggling under undemocratic regimes which the U.S. supports.
The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse, capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.
It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over – if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua – that even in conditions of peace they don’t seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human suffering is enormous.
During my many years in international business and public life, I have had the good fortune of sitting down for lunch with people with whom I completely disagreed, in practice and principle: Soviet communists, heads of state from various unsavory regimes, benighted religious figures, corrupt business leaders.
International regimes, international treaties, international norms are observed not because of the goodness of anybody but because they bring benefits. If they don’t, then the longevity of those agreements come into jeopardy.
Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even – or perhaps especially – in authoritarian regimes.
The president feels not only do we need to change these rogue regimes, but even our friendly allies, who really basically have, sort of, benign dictatorships, need to get with the program if they want to have long-term security and prosperity from terrorism.
Well, like in Orwell books, whom I cherish very much as an author, in classical totalitarian regimes, you always have to make people hate someone. And this hatred is all around the Russian politics.
You can’t afford to be lazy in this business, and in the past I’ve used all the travelling and the hotels as an excuse not to stick to exercise regimes and looking after myself.
Unfortunately, history suggests that dictatorial regimes can withstand years, even decades, of economic sanctions.
The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources.
The problem is you have people who are keenly aware of what their time span is. Governments work towards the next election; BBC governors work for their time there. You have extraordinary regimes that run at the BBC and different people have different outlooks.
Muslims have been subjected to so many tyrants and oppressive regimes. That’s what the Arab Spring was about, but the problem comes in trying to direct a revolution.
Some leaders think time will solve the problem. Their hope is that Assad’s regime will ultimately fall from the heavy toll of the horrors it has spawned. From past experience with such regimes, this scenario is unlikely to happen.
Osama bin Laden is going after us to get us out of the region, so he can deal with the regimes that he sees in the region, or replace them with purists.
The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes.
The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country.
As has been pointed out with Libya, the debate over Libya, sometimes we allow diplomatic relations with imperfect regimes because progress can best be made through engagement instead of isolation.
Dictators aren’t stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook.
When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation – namely, life, liberty and justice for all.
Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even – or perhaps especially – in authoritarian regimes.
The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse, capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.
The press is the only profession protected in the Constitution because of how important the framers viewed the press. But in authoritarian regimes, they control the press.
While foreign competitors, French or Japanese or German, merrily bid for contracts abroad, American companies find themselves tangled in a web of legislation designed to express disapproval, block trade in certain commodities, or perhaps deny resources to disfavored or hostile regimes.
This point seems counter-intuitive, given the amount of conspicuous vulgarity, vice, and immorality in America. Indeed some Islamic fundamentalists argue that their regimes are morally superior to the United States because they seek to foster virtue among the citizens.
The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions – and Iraq may be one of them – when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.
Russia and China have maintained that people prize stability over freedom and that as long as the central State creates conditions for economic growth, people will be complacent and will be willing to literally sell away their rights. In fact, this very economic growth will eventually catch up with these regimes.
The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.
If you know people with Type 2 diabetes, there’s a high likelihood they will have different medication regimes and different lifestyle options. When we label all these various types as the same thing, we treat them the same way, and they should not be treated the same way.
I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that’s going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.
Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike.
Rogue regimes never respond to anything less than hardball.
I’m rubbish – I’m really not good at my beauty regimes.
Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.
Since China embraced Deng Xiaoping’s reforms on 22 December 1978, China has experimented with different exchange-rate regimes. Until 1994, the yuan was in an ever-depreciating phase against the U.S. dollar.
Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
It is also right that we continue to consult with front line workers and the public to ensure that targets are reasonable and achievable, that measurement regimes are proportionate and that the targets take full account of the other reforms that are under way.
What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge – the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.
If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.
I’ve gone on workout regimes, but I seem to have a system that is very resistant to changing.
The U.S. is friends with dictatorial regimes, then invades places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and what happens afterwards is a catastrophe. In the place of their leaders, fundamentalist movements that use the name of Islam spring up, and all that’s left is terror and bloodshed.
Humor is always important. There are people who help us deal with difficulty or hardship; from the concentration camps to the court jester, there was a need for humor. As long as these kinds of things exist, with repressive regimes, you need it to deal with the weight of daily life.
Regimes like the one in Russia are stabilized by the fact that they have no ideology. There is really no ideological means to attack them.
We would like to have friendly regimes with enough broad participation of their populations to maintain long-term stability, so that we would have not only access to the region’s wealth, but we would be able to ensure the security of our good friend Israel.
We think about democracy, and that’s the word that Americans love to use, ‘democracy,’ and that’s how we characterize our system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it’s pretty meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian regimes have democracy in that sense.
The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country.
The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is.
