Trust, but verify had been popular in the USSR when Gorbachev was in college, saying that "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." Following the 2013 Ghouta attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry told a news conference in Geneva on September 14, 2013 that the United States and Russia had agreed on a framework to dispose of Syria's chemical weapons. He said "President Reagan's old adage about 'trust but verify' ... is in need of an update. And we have committed here to a standard that says 'verify and verify'." The similar phrase "Trust and Verify" was also
The war to end war used the phrase in an ironic way in the novel "The Bulpington of Blup" (1932). Walter Lippmann wrote in "Newsweek" in 1967, "The delusion is that whatever war we are fighting is the war to end war", while U.S. President Richard Nixon, in his "Silent Majority" speech (1969), said, "I do not tell you that the war in Vietnam is the war to end wars". Since at least the last third of the 20th century, the alternative wording "the war to end all wars" has become more popular. "The War to End War" was the title of Laurence Stallings's 1959