This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 8, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

NATO once served as a Western wall against communist Russian influence.

So what's NATO's proper role now?

And the pushes for expanding NATO push Russia toward a more firm alliance with China.

Stanley Cobra is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato

Institute.

Cato had a conference in Moscow co-sponsored with the Academy of Sciences.

And one of the Russian speakers said,

we will now be part of a global civilization.

This was in 1990.

1990.

Okay, there was still a Soviet Union, Union, but clearly the Cold War was ending.

You could see it.

The wall had come down.

And this Russian speaker at this conference said, we will be part of a global civilization, which was the repudiation of the Marxist class struggle.

Now, it's no more class struggle. Global civilization, one civilization for everyone, stretching from New York to London to

Paris to Moscow, a lot of us stalk, one global civilization.

And then we began to expand NATO and they were wondering what was going on.

All these other countries are being included.

And I was at a conference again in Moscow in 1995 at the USA Institute at the Academy of Sciences and at the

end of the conference they had a press conference and first question from a

Russian journalist.

...