Calder Walton

"The Kremlin has managed to get a candidate who’s very favorable to itself in the White House. It is still slightly hypothetical, because we don’t know the results of the investigation, but the fact that [the FBI] started an investigation at all, and this question had to be asked at all, shows how weird and unprecedented this situation is."

"The KGB’s greatest attempt to meddle in U.S. presidential elections in the Cold War was against Ronald Reagan, whom the Kremlin regarded as the greatest single threat to the Soviet Union, which he probably was. So, in his various election bids, they did everything that they could, first, to undermine him, and second, to gather compromising material on him. They tried to dig up anything they could that would blacken his name, but they couldn’t find anything. And when that happened, they tried to do anything they could to support his opponents. Moscow sent a telegram to the KGB officers stationed in the U.S. saying essentially, “It doesn’t matter which party you get an agent in, Democrats or Republicans, but whoever it is must defeat Ronald Reagan.” None of this worked. Reagan won in a landslide. But the Kremlin’s strategy was clear: promote favorable candidates and undermine those hostile to Moscow."

"“The Cambridge History” has a clear applied-history spirit to it in that it’s trying to understand what’s going on today by looking to the past. That’s really what we’re trying to do."

"Climate change and pandemics are linked; climate change will, scientists tell us, create more new disease outbreaks."

"The U.S. military’s been talking about rising sea levels on bases since the 1970s, if not earlier."

"...Refugee crises or population displacement, and radicalization of people angry with their own government or willing to take action against countries that they regard as the big polluters. Scarce resources leading to political violence, terrorism — that’s the kind of secondary threat progression that the U.S. intelligence community will be looking at."

"...Climate change is now fused with geopolitics."

"During the Ebola crisis, the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence agency, through its satellite platforms, collected and then publicly disseminated via its website information about the spread of Ebola in West Africa. That is exactly the direction that we need to go in with climate change."

"It’s incumbent for assessments /about climate change/ to be as widely read as possible so that we understand this, so that members of the public can hold policymakers’ feet to the coals about making changes. There’s no good if we find out in 50 years’ time, they were being briefed on this. The stakes are too high for that."

"I feel embarrassed to be an American today – this is disgraceful behaviour"