And now from luminary media and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, the Axfiles,

with your host David Axelrod.

For more than four decades and through many, many momentous events, Robert Gates has been

a fixture in American national security, intelligence, and defense policy.

He served as CIA director under the first president Bush as Secretary of Defense in the

George W. Bush administration for the final two years and then was asked to stay over by

President Obama in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I sat down with Secretary Gates at the Sagitt historical museum near his home in the state

of Washington for my CNN show this week.

And here is that full conversation.

Secretary Gates, great to see you again here in Washington, not that Washington.

The real Washington.

As far away from the Washington DC as you can possibly get at the Ascadget historical

museum near you out here.

But I know that even in these bucolic surroundings, you think about the world as you see it.

And I wanted to ask you, we just celebrated the anniversary of D-Day.

And that really was a harbinger of a new era, superpower era, and the construction of

these global institutions that were assembled to try and avoid the kind of conflict that we

were coming out of.

Those institutions feel like they're fraying a little bit right now.

Why?

Well, I think that first of all, those institutions were developed in the context of the Cold War.

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