When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev’s broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism. Alistair Horne Read Quote
History never repeats, but there are the obvious precedents that pessimists can reach for: Sarajevo, 1914; the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, 1938. But equally relevant might be the tragically meaningless guarantees Britain extended to Poland in 1939. Alistair Horne Read Quote
Mikheil Saakashvili can claim that 80 per cent of Georgians wanted to join NATO; on the other hand, a similar percentage of Russians would almost certainly support Putin’s quest for a strong Russia. We would mistake this mood at our peril. Alistair Horne Read Quote
Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger’s biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War. Alistair Horne Read Quote
Vietnam ended a failure: repeatedly, to me, Kissinger described it as his greatest, and most persistent regret. But Congress was more to blame than Kissinger. Alistair Horne Read Quote
I greatly blame Congress, spurred on by its personal hatred of Nixon, for passing legislation in June through August of ’73 which embargoed any further U.S. help to South Vietnam. Alistair Horne Read Quote
Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky’s role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men’s residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev’s ‘blink’. Alistair Horne Read Quote
Without Kissinger’s work in the Middle East, with Sadat especially, I doubt if the Camp David Agreements five years later would have happened. His achievements over detente, the seeds of trust he sowed in a very distrustful and hostile Moscow, helped over a long period. Alistair Horne Read Quote
There is a widespread view among the liberal intelligentsia to the effect that Henry Kissinger, U.S. National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975 and Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, was a bad man. That may even be an understatement. In this fashionable consensus, he is not just a bad man: he is a war criminal. Alistair Horne Read Quote
Kissinger was surely one of the very few statesmen to try to do something positive to break the log jam of the Cold War; to try to end the war in Vietnam; to bring a halt to the cycle of war in the Middle East. Alistair Horne Read Quote
