"In February 1989 Boris Gromov was the most highly regarded general in the Soviet Army, an obvious candidate to be chief of the general staff, and in time to be minister of defence. Instead, he resigned from the Army to join the Interior Ministry as commander of internal troops—a policeman, in effect. A perplexed journalist begged him to explain why he did it. The answer was that he feared civil war.
"Soviet society was configured in a way that drove it towards internal conflict, he believed. Gromov’s duty, therefore, as he understood it, was to reorient his mindset to meet the main danger. The situation faced by soldiers and statesmen in the West today is fundamentally similar. It is as imminent for them now as it was for General Gromov on the eve of the implosion of the USSR."
-- Dr. David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies, King's College London.
"In the discussions to which this interest has given rise and in the arrangements by which they may terminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. "
-- James Monroe, speech to the US Congress on December 2, 1823