Welcome to Radio Atlantic. I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.

Today, we're bringing you a conversation I had recently with Secretary of State Anthony

Blinken as part of our live conversation series, The Big Story. We held our conversation

on the one-year anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and we talked

about the war and its global consequences. I started our conversation by asking Secretary

Blinken what he found most surprising about the events of the past year.

Well, at first, let me just say it's great to be with you. It's great to be with the entire

Atlantic community. As you'll notice, my voice is a little bit, a little bit hoarse. I think

I left it somewhere along the way in Munich last week, or maybe Turkey. I'm debating

whether it's Scott's way of telling me that I need to be listening even more and talking

a little bit less, but we'll leave that to you. It just means you're doing a lot of diplomacy.

I think I hope that's right. Listen, I think what has, first of all, we were, of course,

not surprised, unfortunately, by the reinvasion of Ukraine. The second shot, as you put it,

because, as everyone knows, we had extraordinary information from many months leading up to it.

And while part of you wanted to believe that Putin would simply not pull the trigger at the end,

unfortunately, all the information was tracking that way. But once he did, while many months of work

that we put into this through diplomacy, to build a strong coalition, to build strong partnerships,

in advance, which, by the way, was the big difference from 2014. We had a run-up and we were

able to use diplomacy to bring countries together, both in terms of the support they'd provide to

Ukraine, the pressure they put on Russia, and the strengthening of our NATO alliance in a defensive

way. And having done all that work, nonetheless, we weren't 100 percent certain that the

center would not only come together, but would hold. And it has. What we've seen a year in is

...