I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source in the fourth summer of hot warfare between Russia and Ukraine.

It's a cruel and deadly war that doesn't know how to stop.

Our guest to offer a helping hand is the journalists and analyst that I've leaned on heavily,

Anatole Levin, an esteemed correspondent for the Financial

Times in London, but now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington,

with his eyes on Eurasia in general. We won't stop the war with this podcast, Anatole,

but we could get to know it a lot better. And I'm thinking, what if we went at it backward?

Consider the counterfactual, hypothetical notion that great nations admitted their mistakes,

which they don't. Might not the United States have declared by now that President George

Jabby Bush went far astray more than a decade ago, enlisting Ukraine into the Western military alliance

known as NATO. Yes, indeed. I mean, that would be a very good start. But as so many people

have written, after the much greater, at least for the US, catastrophe of Vietnam,

when a lot of people thought that this would bring a fundamental change

in attitudes to US foreign and security policy and how it is made.

But in fact, this only lasted a very few years. And then under Reagan, essentially, the

national gods were put back on their pedestals. And the whole Vietnam experience was swept

under the carpet. And I think there is a certain, you know, similarity there, because of course,

Vietnam was not, well, it didn't

start as a Republican war, although their pressure had a good deal to do with it.

But of course, it was launched by a Democratic administration, just as the whole disaster

of NATO expansion was initially launched under a Democratic administration was then, you know, taken over

by a Republican administration. But the greater part of the bipartisan foreign and security

...