Welcome to today's discussion. My name is Glenn Dyson. I'm joined by Alexander Mercurris and Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, who had a very important role in contributing to negotiating an end to the Cold War in 1989. Welcome, sir. Hello, a good day. So, well, the topic we really

wanted to discuss today was the rise and the potential fall of American hegemony in the world.

And as after the Cold War, the US obviously had a choice between

embracing more a multipolar system or pursuing security based on the hegemony. And I would say

the choice of hegemony was chosen and justified based on what I would consider to be a genuine

objective of advancing a more liberal world order,

more or less according to Francis Fukuyama's ideas.

And now 30 plus years later, one gets the impression that neither hegemony or the mission of advancing

liberal democratic values are doing particularly

well as the US is experiencing more domestic problems while global primacy is contested more and more

by other states. So one can also argue that the hegemonic international system perhaps is

less capable of adjusting to shifts in the international distribution of power. So with this topic in

mind, I thought we could start with NATO as hegemony largely translated into NATO expansion. But Mr. Matlock, you and your

colleagues, such as George Kennan or William Perry, you were all, well, I would say fiercely

opposed to NATO expansion. In your words, at the time, I think you said it would go down in

history as the most profound strategic blunder.

So I guess I wanted to start off with two questions.

First, why did you see NATO expansion as being a strategic blunder?

And also, second, what do you make of them as you were there at the time?

To what extent was there made a promise to Gorbachev that this would not happen?

Yes, I did argue strongly along with a number of my colleagues. In fact, many of us who were in

senior positions when we negotiated into the Cold War, we argued that NATO should not expand.

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