When President Dwight Eisenhower undermined and humiliated Britain and France at Suez in 1956, it was only the most blatant of many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its already weakening global influence. (Of Paradise and Power, p. 72)
Robert Kagan
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a reluctant politician. His decision to run for president in 1952 was rooted in a deep concern over the scope of the domestic debate about how best to respond to the Communist challenge.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Mr. Chairman, you have invited me to speak on the subject of Britain and Europe. Perhaps I should congratulate you on your courage. If you believe some of the things said and written about my views on Europe, it must seem rather like inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence! ...The European Community is one manifestation of that European identity, but it is not the only one. We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, peoples who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities...To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality...it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
Margaret Thatcher
The force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States (Of Paradise and Power, p. 19)
Robert Kagan
What for me makes people like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and John Adams and George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan such extraordinary leaders is that they had integrity through and through. What they were on the inside and what they said on the outside was harmonious. There are a lot of people like that. I think that if people try to live a very different personal life not consistent with the role they've assumed as a governor or senator or president, we lose something as a nation.
John Adams
...against which we should direct all our force, the navy of France: in the destruction of her marine we might see some hope of recovering America; but while our army remained in that country, we were to expect nothing from its operations. On the continent of Europe, it might be employed; there we might contend with France, in a manner that would make her feel that her own consequence was at stake. But the old Whig system of alliances on the continent had been given up, and we were left to fight all our battles by ourselves. If these alliances were renewed, France might then be taught, that rashness, not prudence, had made her enter into the American confederacy...America...might be won in Europe, while England might be ruined in America.
Charles James Fox
Kagan, Robert
Kagen, Steve
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