From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello, and welcome to Free Expression, the podcast from the Wall Street Journal with me, Jerry Baker.

This is our inaugural edition, and I'm joined. I'm very happy and privileged to be joined this week for our first edition by Condoleezza Rice, of course,

who was former Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration before that,

national security advisor to President George W. Bush, now is president of the Hoover Institution

at Stanford University, a return to academia for her. Condoleezza Rice has been one of the foremost

experts on Soviet Union and then Russia, and so the conversation that we're having, and I

should say we're having this conversation Monday afternoon, the 14th of February, things are moving very fast in that part of the world. But I want to ask Secretary Rice what she thinks about the larger strategic challenge that Russia is posing. So Secretary Rice, thank you very much indeed for joining us. It's a pleasure to be with you. So let me start obviously with this. As I said, you spent a lot of your career studying Russia, researching Russia, and then dealing with Russia as an official in the George H.W. Bush administration. And then, of course, as I said, as a senior official in the George W. Bush administration. So you've met Vladimir Putin many, many times. You know that famous riddle in a mystery wrapped inside an enigma or whatever it was that Winston Churchill,

however else Winston Churchill described it as.

As we sit here now, we're still very unclear about what exactly is going to happen on the border

between Russia and Ukraine right now, and things could happen very quickly in the next few hours

and days.

But I wanted to ask you, first of all, Secretary, what's your sense, given what you know about

Russia?

What is Putin's strategic objective here?

What does he really want?

Yes, well, I think that his strategic objective, and it really has been strategic objective

for some time, is to reassert Russian authority over what was the former Soviet Union

and as far east as that can go. He was one who believed that the end of the Cold War and the way

that it ended was a humiliation to the Russian nation, to the Russian people. He's a sort of self-appointed

person to write that wrong

in his own thinking. And he's really systematically, over the last decade and a half of Seoul,

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