Hi everyone, I'm Glenn Dyson and I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Ambassador Jack Matlock,

an American diplomat and, of course, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union.

It's great to have you back, sir. It's always good to see you.

Whenever we speak with you, it's a bit like a conversation with history, so we greatly appreciate it.

Yeah, to be with you.

So, yeah, you have written a book looking back to look ahead, and I thought this was a great title alone, because we can learn a lot from the past as we enter a very uncertain future.

And again, you graduated from high school when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.

You specialized in Soviet studies. You entered the foreign services.

You were a diplomat for 35 years.

And of course, towards the end of your service, you were the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union

and participated in negotiating an end to the Cold War in 1989.

So you really lived through the entire Cold War, through all its faces, and saw how also then the post-Cold

War peace came but also fell away as we instead pursued NATO enlargement.

So I really wanted to today address this issue as we appear to have squandered the post-Cold

War peace, but now we're entering a new period of multipolarity.

So I guess a very straightforward, maybe broad question.

Where do you see us going wrong after the Cold War?

What could have been done differently?

I think that our governments and media

encouraged a misunderstanding of how the Cold War ended.

And they looked at it as if it was a quasi-military victory and that also the Russia was a loser because the Soviet Union broke up.

Now, there were several things wrong with that.

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