I'm John Batts who with my colleague Michael McFaul, former ambassador to the Soviet now Russian Federation,

as well as a professor at Stanford University and the director of the Freeman Spogley Institute on the Stanford campus.

But most important for me right now is the author of a new book, which is not even slightly long enough because he has Tehran and North Korea and all these other players to bring on.

But he's kept it to Russia and China.

So we're doing some backstory here to understand the opportunity and the challenge of the 21st century.

Gentlemen Square, June, 1989. There's a lot of detail here, but it comes to the fact that on

camera we saw the Chinese Communist Party direct its army to be cruel and violent and murderous. The opportunity at that point was

that the Soviet Union was deeply troubled and would fall apart while Michael was there in 90 and

91. The Chinese Communist Party thought it too was vulnerable to such a uprising from the bottom

and they crushed those students.

George H.W. Bush was the president.

And he made a decision.

The decision was to reach out with an open hand.

Why did he do that?

And what did we learn from it, Michael?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I think it was a tragic moment in American foreign policy history.

I understand it.

And the argument for doing that by the Bush administration is that we needed the Chinese

to balance against the Soviet Union.

That was started by Nixon and Kissinger and the idea we helped to pull them away.

Now, the split, I want to emphasize, the split between the Soviets and the Chinese communists happened well before then.

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