This is a series of cebes. I'm John Bachelor with my colleague Anatole

leaving of the Quincy Institute for Responsible State Craft.

Anatold Washington's think tanks and Moscow.

The opinion in Washington is critical to understand if we're in a new cold war

or there's some other metaphor we haven't found yet for what this

conflict looks like from the outside. Moscow is as drained as everyone else by

the two years of fighting.

Has Washington given up on Moscow, the Rapprochement, the reset, the detente?

Is that all gone by the board and the think tanks are now committed to confrontation and conquest over at least

the Putin government if not his successor.

Well we have to see what happens in November and who the next president is.

And if it is Trump, what he will, his administration will actually do, because it's very difficult of course on his record in his last

administration to say what he would do.

Certainly there is no talk whatsoever of detente or rapprochement.

But at some stage, well the Biden administration itself has said repeatedly

that the war will have to end in negotiations and its strategies to try to strengthen

Ukraine at the negotiating table. So at some stage I think yes there there will be talks but you know at the moment

the news from the Ukrainian front line,

a piece in the BBC this morning,

a piece in the Washington Post yesterday,

you know, suggest that the Russians, you know,

could be on the verge of winning much more territory.

...