War & Peace Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon’s line is built like a siren: it takes a familiar metaphor (the Cold War as “cold”) and flips it into an emergency. “Isn’t thawing; it is burning” doesn’t just update the temperature, it rewires the audience’s expectations. If it’s burning, then waiting is irresponsible, détente is naive, and any talk of coexistence becomes complicity. The phrase “deadly heat” is doing double duty, conjuring both battlefield violence and the existential dread of nuclear escalation. It’s not a policy memo; it’s a demand for urgency.

The second sentence tightens the vise by personifying “Communism” as a single-minded actor with intent. “Isn’t sleeping” rejects the comforting idea that the threat has ebbed on its own. Then Nixon stacks verbs - “plotting, scheming, working, fighting” - a crescendo that turns ideology into an omnipresent adversary. The list is less about describing Soviet behavior than about disciplining domestic debate: if the enemy is always in motion, any American pause can be framed as weakness. Even “working” is ominous here, collapsing ordinary labor into subversion, a rhetorical move that conveniently blurs the line between foreign rival and internal suspect.

In Cold War context, this is the language of mobilization: justify budgets, alliances, surveillance, and intervention by portraying time itself as hostile. Nixon’s intent is to seize the narrative tempo. If the world is already on fire, he gets to argue that only hard power can keep it from spreading.