Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations and we're having a conversation today on what is this Monday, February 28th in the afternoon.

We have to specify the time since this war in Ukraine is moving so fast and so many other things are happening. A conversation with Eric Edelman, we've had seven excellent conversations actually on foreign policy and defense policy related matters.

This one I really want to take advantage of Eric's long career in the US government that is having served very senior levels with the State Department and the Defense Department and the White House. That's pretty unusual and having been ambassador to Finland and then Turkey, both actually both countries that I don't think we would have predicted this maybe a few weeks ago have actually been playing some role in this in this Russia Ukraine crisis. Eric, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Bill. I'm glad to represent Northern and Southern flanks of NATO. Yeah, that's right. That's good. Yeah, hopefully we'll talk about that. That's kind of amazing. Finland is suggesting that they might want to come in. So let's have a, I mean, there's a ton to talk about and I think people have covered pretty well what's been happening though and some of the surprises and all that.

But let's assume it's okay. It's today. It's Monday afternoon February 28th president calls you ahead and says Eric, you've been at the high levels of government. You've been in meetings like this where we have to consider what to do about this complicated the many choices we have and the many situations, many aspects of the situation we face. So tell me what I should think about it.

I guess let's begin with whatever Putin person. It's his war, right? We can't really get away from that fact. And you've been I think not only have you been in meetings with presidents and the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense and circumstances like this. You've actually been in meetings with Vladimir Putin, I think.

I have. I was in the larger meeting that President Bush hosted with President Putin when he came to visit Washington in the fall of 2001 after 9-11. It was in the cabinet room and it was a large meeting. I don't want to suggest that it was an intimate session with Vladimir Putin.

I did join in a slightly more intimate meeting with Bob Gates and Putin when President Bush sent Secretary Gates to Moscow to meet with Putin in 2007, the spring of 2007 after the announcements that President Bush made about deploying missile defense interceptors to Poland and a ground-based radar to the Czech Republic.

Which famously was the occasion or at least part of the occasion for Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference denouncing the US unipolarity and essentially announcing his intention to try and in retrospect overturn the international order.

I can have the privilege of being in some meetings with them.

No, I was at that Munich Security Conference and I watched it. It was pretty astonishing. It was such a polite place and usually even the people who don't like each other pretend to be diplomatic and so forth.

But I remember thinking at the time, well, he's reacting or taking advantage of European unhappiness with us about Iraq and that he's reacting to this decision and trying to blow us out of it. And of course President Obama did reverse all our large part of it, I guess, right when he took office.

But yeah, I didn't, I got to say I did not appreciate at the time that this was sort of laying the groundwork for 15 years of an attempt to unravel undue NATO and unravel the liberal world order.

But so say a word about what it was like to be in these small meetings with him.

Well, one of the things that struck me and at the time was that President Putin does not tend to engage in eye-to-eye contact with his interlocutors.

And, you know, I think as we all know from everyday conversations, it's a little bit odd if you're talking to someone and the tables we were talking across were much smaller.

But I think that's not to the oversized tables that he's been speaking to people that in more recent days, both foreign visitors and his own intimate advisors.

I saw you had tweeted out earlier today a picture of him meeting this morning with his advisors and yesterday when he announced the heightening of Russian nuclear forces alert status.

He met with the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff General Karashima.

And they were also at one of these enormously long, long tables.

What's the psychology that you think that seems like a vaguely sociopathic kind of paranoid or I don't know what, you know, kind of thing to do.

Well, I do think, look, I think that there was something I always thought a little bit off about his personality.

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