I'm John Batser with Gregory Coppley, my friend and colleague 1974.

Gregory and I were a younger man 50 years in a wink. Three events Gregory ties together in a recent essay.

One, July 74, Turkey invaded Cyprus and the island is still divided harshly.

There's still bad feelings between the adversaries.

Two, the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency in August of 74.

And 3. The coup against Halle Salasia and Ethiopia in September of 74.

All three events at this remove 50 years later look like a Russian

hand. Do I say that correctly Gregory? Well a Soviet hand more to the point, we have to really distinguish, as we did during the Cold War between the Russians and the Soviets.

The Soviets were playing a very strong game, they were with their whole totalitarian movement that

there was such a thing as monolithic communism and that it was the

inevitable fate of the world to come under their sway.

And what we saw Richard Nixon doing as a result of some really advanced work in the late 60s, early 70s by Stephen

Personi and supported by General Al Haig at that time, was to introduce to

Nixon the concept that China could be prized away from the

Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China. That would have meant that the image

of monolithic communism had been broken and that the US and its allies

were then free to, if you like, divide and conquer the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China separately.

There is no question that in hindsight that Nixon's visit to China was the thing

which broke the sense of inevitability of

Soviet global control that myth began to to break away then. However, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at that time was so

angry at this that they knew that this was a critical point. They were just coming into their prime. NATO itself was only 25 years old and very vibrant and so was the Warsaw Treaty Organization which was controlled by Moscow that was 24 years old at the time and they

were really in the full flush of their bigger and the the Soviets decided to to

...