Anne Applebaum Quotes

For the record: No treaties prohibiting NATO expansion were ever signed with Russia. No promises were broken. Nor did the impetus for NATO expansion come from a “triumphalist” Washington. On the contrary, Poland’s first efforts to apply in 1992 were rebuffed...But Poland and others persisted, precisely because they were already seeing signs of the Russian revanchism to come.

That moment has passed. Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year's Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide,

Of all the different kinds of damage done by the Second World War, the hardest to quantify is the psychological and emotional damage. The brutality of the First World War created a generation of fascist leaders, idealistic intellectuals, and expressionist artists who twisted the human form into inhuman shapes and colors in an attempt to convey their disorientation. But... the Second World War entered far more deeply... Constant daily violence shaped the human psyche...

Soviet reality was always a strange one: the factory is barely functioning, in the shops there is nothing to buy, old ladies cannot afford to heat their apartments, yet in the streets outside, banners proclaim the 'triumph of socialism' and the 'heroic achievements of the Soviet motherland.'

If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

Against this background of improvisation and violence, the first Soviet labour camps were born. Like so many other Bolshevik institutions, they were created ad hoc... as an emergency measure in the heat of the civil war. This is not to say the idea had no prior appeal. Three weeks before the , Lenin... was... sketching... [a] vague plan to organize 'obligatory work duty' for wealthy capitalists.

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine.

The Western Right, on the other hand, did struggle to condemn Soviet crimes, but sometimes using methods that harmed their own cause. Surely the man who did the greatest damage to anti-communism was the American Senator Joe McCarthy. Recent documents showing that some of his accusations were correct do not change the impact of his overzealous pursuit of communists in American public life: ultimately, his public "trials" of communist sympathizers would tarnish the cause of anti-communism with the brush of chauvinism and intolerance. In the end, his actions served the cause of neutral historical inquiry no better than those of his opponents.

The <nowiki> </nowiki> crisis in Ukraine, and the prospect of a further crisis in NATO itself, is not the result of our triumphalism but of our failure to react to Russia’s aggressive rhetoric and its military spending. Why didn’t we move NATO bases eastward a decade ago? Our failure to do so has now led to a terrifying plunge of confidence in Central Europe...Our mistake was not to humiliate Russia but to underrate Russia’s revanchist, revisionist, disruptive potential.

I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it [Hunter Biden's laptop] to be interesting. (April 6, 2022)

Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

Trump's fawning attitude towards dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

More important, he [Trump] has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had "total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. ... Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals "a bunch of dopes and babies," and America's intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the "deep state" and whose advice he has ignored.

Putin’s overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If [Alexei] Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.

[O]ne Western policy stands out as a phenomenal success, particularly when measured against the low expectations with which it began: the integration of Central Europe and the Baltic States into the European Union and NATO. Thanks to this double project, more than 90 million people have enjoyed relative safety and relative prosperity for more than two decades in a region whose historic instability helped launch two world wars.