I think the Cold War works as a great analogy or simile for different kinds of conflict. It’s funny, when you look back at it, it’s one of the last times that the boundaries were clear. Now, as we see on ‘Homeland,’ there are no clear boundaries and enemies.
My generation was the tail end of the Cold War.
The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.
The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied, despite the understandable sensitivities that such a conclusion provokes among the tenderhearted in the West and some of the former leaders of the defeated side.
During my childhood in the Cold War, my family saw America as a great ally in our common struggle to keep back Soviet communism.
Much has changed since the end of the Cold War that augurs well for the survival of our nation.
The United States emerged from the Cold War with unprecedented absolute and relative power. It was truly first among unequals.
Stalin’s policies pushed the world into the Cold War. Putin has the potential to be equally as dangerous.
The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It’s not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.
Our Cuba policy didn’t make much sense during the Cold War and makes even less sense now.
The Cold War practice of garrisoning large numbers of troops with their families on massive bases in places like Germany is now, in part, obsolete.
Don’t you want to know what’s real and what’s not? I remember when I was a kid, you know, this whole Cold War thing. They had us scared of the Russians. So, it’s almost like, what’s real and what’s not?
During the Cold War, workers proudly contributed to national defense, but the carelessness and haste in handling toxic waste created a nightmare of pollution for subsequent generations.
The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.
During the Cold War, the United States took its friends where it found them. If they were willing to cast their lot with us, from the Shah to Gen. Pinochet, we welcomed them. Democratic dissidents like Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Olof Palme in Sweden got the back of our hand.
In their war against Israel’s existence, the Arab governments took advantage of the Cold War. They enlisted the military, economic, and political support of the communist world against Israel, and they turned a local, regional conflict into an international powder keg.
Construction of the first gas pipeline system was started during the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, and for all those years, from the 1960s until this day, Russia has been fulfilling its contract obligations in a very consistent and reliable way, regardless of the political situation.
We probably haven’t seen the variety and diversity of threats to Americans’ safety and well-being and our national security in a long, long time. Some have said it almost makes you yearn for the Cold War days when you knew who the bad guys were and who the good guys were, and there was a wall dividing us.
To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as ‘what NASA does’. This perception is – in many respects – a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.
The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.
During the Cold War, America took sides not only in disputes between Arab countries, but also in debates within them.
America stood at the summit of power, emerging from the Cold War as an economic, cultural and military force without equal.
I don’t live in the Cold War. Some people maybe still live in the Cold War, but this is their problem, not mine.
In particular, Kissinger was a key player during a transformative period of the imperial presidency, in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Vietnam War undermined the traditional foundations on which it had stood since the early years of the Cold War: elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support.
The rule for effective governance is simple. It is one Ronald Reagan knew by heart. And one that he successfully employed with Social Security and the Cold War. When there is a problem, you fix it. That is the job you have been sent to do and you cannot wait for someone else to do it for you.
Thirteen years after the end of the Soviet Union, the American press establishment seemed eager to turn Ukraine’s protested presidential election on November 21 into a new cold war with Russia.
The Cold War was over, presidential sex scandals superseded foreign concerns, and the American public was more interested in reading about fiendish serial killers, dependable mystery series protagonists, and any book thought to be in the vein of Bridget Jones and her abbreviation-happy diary.
Growing up during the Cold War, I remember the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear war. In primary school we were taught to ‘duck-and-cover’ for protection. But even as children hiding under wooden desks, we recognized the inadequacies of this strategy.
As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the ’50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.
For some reason, lots of terrible things start here and then spread. The Cold War was one. It didn’t start in Berlin – it started in Athens in December 1944; the contagion in the eurozone started here in 2010. We are perfectly capable as Europeans of messing things up unnecessarily.
I think in some ways what Snowden is, is he’s a mix of a cold war spy novel and post-9/11 spy novel.
I was on the front lines in the Cold War, and I was on the front lines in the fight against Al Qaeda.
I am an armor officer. I grew up as a part of the team that helped to field M-1s and M-60-A3s to the army back in 1980s. It’s still a magnificent tank, and we designed it for the Cold War and Central Europe.
We’ve suffered a war, and one thing we know: Whenever our nation’s faced war, whether it was in the 1980s when we were winning the Cold War or in the 1940s during World War II, the responsible thing to do has been to borrow money to win the war.
I would prefer to abandon the terminology of the past. ‘Superpower’ is something which we used during the cold war time. Why use it now?
As the Cold War melts into history, our first concern should be the preservation and extension of human rights and democracy.
Reagan won the Cold War by first restoring America’s economy and military and then staring down an economically weakened Soviet Union. He knew defeating Russia couldn’t be accomplished without laying the groundwork.
Leading with its values gave the United States a sense of purpose in the Cold War.
I remembered being young in the late ’70s and early ’80s and growing up at the height of the Cold War. I remembered how scared I was of nuclear weapons, how often I though about them and about the possibility of everything and everyone I knew vanishing in a second in temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun.
The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
There isn’t a more important issue in the world than global warming. Even the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs crisis were a notional threat.
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.
I was a sailor. I was torpedoed, spent two weeks in a lifeboat. I was on the Murmansk run; I worked a 20 mm. machine gun, helped bring down a Stuka, all that kind of stuff. I’ve got letters from Franklin Roosevelt for things I did then. But those kind of credentials didn’t work for you in the Cold War.
The Sino-American competition involves two significant realities that distinguish it from the Cold War: neither party is excessively ideological in its orientation; and both parties recognize that they really need mutual accommodation.
I wore the cloth of the nation for over 31 years in peace and war, from the Vietnam and Cold War eras, to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the emergence of China.
A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson’s vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country.
The magnificent army that fought in Desert Storm is a great army, and it still is a magnificent army today. But it was one we designed for the Cold War, and the Cold War has been over for ten years now.
For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world.
American power remains today what it was in the Second World War and the Cold War: the greatest force for freedom in the world.
At the end of the Cold War, the prevailing view in Washington was that the U.S. was strong, and Russia was weak and did not count in a unipolar world. We disregarded Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion, the Iraq War, and the U.S.-led military intervention in Serbia for the independence of Kosovo.
