Time & Perspective Quote by David Bruce

American optimism, in David Bruce's telling, isn't a virtue so much as a recurring strategic mistake: a faith that the Soviet system might someday behave like a polite participant in a rules-based club. The line is calibrated to puncture a particular Cold War comfort story - that ideology is negotiable if the West just offers the right mix of trade, summits, and patience.

Bruce's most pointed move is the time scale. He doesn't argue the Soviets are merely stubborn in the present tense; he frames their posture as an extension of "centuries" of "fundamental Russian policies". That phrasing quietly shifts the debate from leaders and moods to deep state habits: security through buffers, suspicion of encirclement, influence over neighboring zones. By invoking "as a matter of fact", he claims the authority of hard experience, not theory, as if to say: we've been romanticizing what history has already documented.

The subtext is also about American self-image. "Too optimistic" isn't simply an appraisal of Moscow; it's a critique of Washington's tendency to project its own political flexibility onto adversaries, confusing pragmatism with conversion. Bruce is warning against the idea that a regime born from revolution and maintained through coercion will voluntarily "alter" its core approach because Americans find that outcome reasonable.

Contextually, this reads like diplomatic realism from inside the Cold War machinery: a pushback against cycles of detente euphoria and subsequent disappointment. The intent isn't to demand perpetual hostility; it's to insist that negotiations start from what the Soviet project is built to do, not what Americans wish it would become.