Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we are debating something of historic proportion, and that is the question of whether or not the NATO alliance shall be enlarged to include three countries. At this point, those three countries are Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. This is not a new concept. In 1994, the United States announced that we were, in fact, going to consider the enlargement of NATO. Why? The world has changed so dramatically. The Berlin Wall is down. The Soviet Union has dissipated, or at least broken up into different political entities. We are starting to see the world in different terms. For over 50 years, we saw the world in terms of East and West, the Soviet Union and the United States, the cold war. How many of us, as kids in the 1950s, huddled under our desks in preparation for the possibility of an air raid? Now what a different world we live in--a world where the United States of America and its taxpayers, since 1991, have given to Russia over $100 billion in an effort to help that country get back on its feet. What was once our mortal enemy, a country that we literally spent $6 trillion to defend against, is now our ally. So we view the world in much different terms, and now we should view NATO in different terms. My colleagues who come to the floor in opposition to NATO enlargement are stuck in old thinking, as far as I am concerned.”