Political Quotes

“I really would take issue with the comparison between the situation today we are talking about with the expansion of NATO and Yalta. We had a ground war, a terrible war that impacted almost every nation in Europe, Western and Eastern, that was costly, and at the end of it, with two sides converging, the Americans and the Russians converging on Europe, basically, I believe in a horrible mistake--I think the Senator would probably agree--the politicians sat down and carved up Europe and therein caused the problem that we faced. And from that came NATO and the cold war and everything else. This is not what we are talking about today. This is Russia today. This is a country that has had its ears pinned back pretty well as far as its conventional forces. It still has a ton of nuclear material and certainly nuclear weapons, tons of it, literally, that we are interested in working with them to get rid of. But I do not know what message it sends, not only to the American taxpayers but also to the Russians themselves, to say, on one hand, as the Senator is saying, that we would provide moneys to this empire, former evil empire, to take down their strategic systems--and we are doing that with Nunn-Lugar and other funds--and, on the other hand, spend as much as $250 billion to bring nations into an alliance to defend ourselves against that very same nation. Now, there is an inconsistency there somewhere, that sooner or later somebody will figure out that it doesn't make sense.…”