This is a Kato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. A Russian invasion of Ukraine now

appears more likely, so what's the best course of action for the US? How has NATO amped up the stakes of this conflict?

Will Ruger is the new president of the American Institute for Economic Research.

He and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandau discuss what's likely and what's diplomatically possible

in the current standoff at the Russian-Ukraine border.

Whenever I watch two countries that are having a disagreement about something, how they line up and make decisions

and bring themselves really very close to the brink of war, you know, I have to wonder, and I think a lot of people

do, how could this have been avoided?

And how could we have not ended up at this particular point?

The United States does it a lot.

Whenever I hear the words no fly zone come out of somebody's mouth,

I always think that much worse things are a lot closer than they otherwise would be. So Doug I'll

start with you how do we get here? Well this goes back to the end of the Cold War.

We should start by noting that Vladimir Putin is not a nice man.

I mean, this is a dictatorship.

He plays rough.

What he's threatening Ukraine with is wrong, it would be tragic and awful

and criminal if he went and attacked Ukraine.

Nevertheless, we should understand that we believe very strongly we won the Cold War,

and we treated Russia as a defeated power.

Declassified documents tell us that a lot of assurances were made to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the people around them that NATO would not expand. We ignored that. The Clinton administration moved very strongly ahead. You know, the Russians to some degree The We dismantled Serbia, a historic interest of theirs.

World War I in many ways came about because the Russians were prepared to defend Serbia as a fellow Slavic nation.

...