Welcome everyone. My name is Glendizen and I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris.

And today we also have the great honor of being joined by George Bebe, who is a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA.

He's also been an intelligence analyst, a policy advisor to Vice President Cheney and currently serving as director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute.

Welcome, it's again a great privilege to have you on.

Well, thank you. I very much appreciate the invitation.

So I thought perhaps a good place to start. It would be a big question, which is why

the post-Cold War peace fell apart. As well often here in the West, the narrative often is that

the relationship was progressing until, of course, Putin

came along and spoiled it, but I often see in Russia that this narrative is fiercely rejected,

where they obviously blame the West for having ended the containment, for having, well,

I guess, failed to end the containment policies.

And this is how they see it.

And, well, as a former director of Russia analysis of the CIA, you surely spent time on this.

So I was wondering how you assess the reason for why we lost the Cold War peace.

I know it's not a very simple black or white answer, but it's a good place to start.

Yeah, it's a very, very complex question. A lot of variables went into producing the situation that we're in. Of course, there was a lot of optimism, I think, both in the United States and in

Moscow at the end of the Cold War,

that we could build something fundamentally new and transform that relationship.

But I don't think there was ever really a uniformity of views in the United States and in Moscow about what the vision ought to be

that we could both pursue. I think in Russia, broadly speaking, there was a desire to build what

Mikhail Gorbachev called the common European home.

In other words, we would have a common vision of Europe that would be inclusive,

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