Rachel

“President Carter’s re-election campaign in 1979 commenced amid spiralling global oil prices. With Bandar’s help, Carter drafted a letter to Fahd requesting Saudi Arabia to put more oil on the market.69 Fahd responded: ‘Tell my friend, the president of the United States of America, when they need our help, they will not be disappointed.’70 He promised to do ‘anything in his power externally or internally to ensure your re-election’, since this was ‘essential if there was ever to be a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’.71 This assistance, which saw Saudi oil trading $4–5 a day below other suppliers, cost the kingdom $30m to $40m a day. In gratitude, Carter invited Bandar to the White House in early December 1979, where they discussed Middle East politics and the US–Saudi relationship.”
― Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade

“The imperative of war is to kill, and thus all wars are exercises in sanctioned murder.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No”
― Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin

“Compounding the horror, German officials committed an act of staggering insensitivity: they struck a commemorative medal with a depiction of the sinking ship on one side and on the other a smiling skeleton under the inscription “Business above all.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918