Vladislav Zubok on What the Cold War Actually Was

few years after I guess it quote formally ended. Yeah, And yet by the time I was learning about it in high school, it was being taught it might as well have been like Civil.

how different the interpretations of history actually were. So, for instance, I had learned about the American Revolution right as a lot of Americans did, but in the UK it is, of course the American War of Independence, and so it was just a massive culture shock for me to go from that sort of US oriented curriculum, Yeah, to something more British centric or more international. So one thing I am very curious about is how the Cold War sort of played out from the non US perspective.

nineteen ninety one. He's also written several other books sort of in the same general history. A Lot of Soviet History is a prior book that I also highly recommend, came out in twenty twenty one, Collapsed the Fall of the Soviet Union? What really happened there? So Professor Zubach, thank you so much for coming on odd Laws.

the Cold War? Because your book actually does sort of offer a different claim, and it seems to be more about something basic and land and territory and mostly centered on Europe.

of a Cold war. It was the you know, the sixties, seventies, and I grew up as a young believer that the future belongs to communism. Don't laugh at me, And I just was surprised why so many people couldn't get it that communism is the way of the future. And then very late in my sort of student years, I began to realize, hey, it's much more complicated. You know, the world is divided and so and so forth, And we were told the world is divided between socialism and capitalism.

So when I learned about the Cold War, I mostly learned it from American literature. So it was very much influenced by American books because nothing was written in the Sovigine about the Cold War. Nothing. That's a special, special question why. But you know, I couldn't find a single decent book on the Cold War. So I learned it

from American authors like John Lewis Gaddis. Some people may remember there were great books by John Lewis Gaddis in the eighties, and so I read them and totally absorbed them. And so the ironic thing that many years later, thirty years later, I'm coming back to my original kind of idea. Yes, it was the battle between socialism and capitalism, yes, And in a sense, the whole phenomenon of the Cold War should not be understood like, oh, it's a game of

great powers. It's about, you know, Europe becoming a vacuum after World War Two to be filled by you know, two great powers, the Soviet Union. In the United States, yeah, it was there. All that was there, and an ideology was there of communism and American liberalism. But for instance, business people hear about ideas, they kind of become a little bit so horrific and they said, just ideas, tell

me something more important. So the most important thing it was the battle for the future of capitalism in my view, and you know, for everyone who were in Europe and in Washington and New York, or or in Moscow, whatever, in Tokyo, it was about that because you know, the previous thirty years of capitalism were disastrous. Capitalism discredited itself. So if you were in the late forties in Europe, you would think, hmm, maybe I should become a young communist.

So the previous disasters use of capitalism caused the phenomenon Cold War, and it was just geopolitical situation when Europe was out for grabs. Much of Europe thanks to Hitler was up for grabs between the two you know, coalitions between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers. They are so called Angelis Saxons. It gained geopolitical dimensions in this way, but essentially it was about which system would modernize the

world better. This is essentially throughout the Cold Warrior had modifications of the same questions until it was answered very much in favor of capitalism in the seventies and the agies particularly, Yes, capitalism is much much better. In fact, that's the only.

very capitalist. Maybe capitalism requires a lot of expansion, a lot of domination of the world to keep going, whereas the US came away thinking, well, you know, Soviets believe in communism, and communism is going to take over the world. How did that process actually happen?

we would ever build anything called communism already. But you know, let me return to your question, and let's say the same point to say, let's talk about the start of the Cold War, because it was an immensely long contest, immensely long confrontation, like for four decades, right, so it's very important. I broke up my book into four major sections.

And if you are in the first section, when the Cold War just started in the Soviet Union, they read Lenin, and Lenin said, as long as capitalism exists, it would produce imperialism, and imperialism is about competition for resources and wars, global wars, because capitalism is global. So that's what you learn about the other side in the Soviet Union. So whenever somebody likes Stalin would say, hey, you know, the

United States now is a top capitalist power. That means that you know, other powers should compete, like the UK should, British Empire should compete with Americans. And this is essentially the main source of instability and global war. This is what you believed in as a matter faith in the Soviet Union. If you are in the United States, it's much less let's say, theoretical, and more like based on

experience of dealing with Red Russia or Communist Russia. And during the first decade, Americans completely dismissed the existence of Red Russia and never granted diplomatic recognition to that country because there was, you know, a kind of nonsense for Americans to think that people don't believe in private property. They reject entrepreneurship, They reject God, atheists and so on and so forth. This is just a nonsense. This state

cannot exist. And then you know, they began to change their mind gradually, Oh it should stay and all that. But what made them change their mind about the Soviet Union above all was the Great Depression and a huge crisis of capitalists. Back to my original point about the context between capitalism and communism, the very fact that the idea of this context entered the American mind, you know, and later Americans even began to say, oh, communists have

taken over the world and all that stuff. It is because of their internal insecurity, American internal insecurity, because the Great Depression did take place. It was almost ten years. Yes, America exited the war as powerful as it never had been. But thanks to the war, nobody could say with another Great Depression happened after the end of the war. So that was immense internal insecurity. Coupled with that American exceptionalism, you know, we've done so well before, we should do

great in the future. That produced American impulse towards the Cold War. And I would say, you know, I'm back and forth on this question. By the way, you know, when you ask who started it in such a complex context, between the two ways of light, two ways of modernization, you know, it's very difficult sometimes to say who started it.

But I would say Americans had more sources, and therefore they were much more proactive in nineteen forty five, forty six, forty seven, when they began to see the Soviets acting not as they had expected, strangely, because the Soviets always acted as Soviets, they just were expansionists, they were assertive,

but after forty five they were also extremely weak. They lost twenty seven million people during World War Two and all that stuff, So Americans knew that, but they also saw Soviets being expansionists and decided to take an initiative. So much of the Cold War, in a way, during its original phases Americans acting, Americans doing the Marshall Plan, Americans doing dividing Germany into two parts in reaction to the perceived Soviet expansionism and real Soviet expansionism, but also

realizing we're stronger, we can stop them. We have huge wealth, we have atomic bomb and they don't, and we have resources to stop communism. But the premise is in the America in mind that communism is such a dangerous thing that can spread all over the world. And why he can spread hello, because capitalism is weak, and particularly in Europe, because capitalisms stopped working in Europe, and you know, we must reignite it, we must just set it straight and you know, make it stand on both feet.

to foment communism around the world. And obviously the Soviets moved a missile to Cuba and thought a war in Afghanistan and the Gola, et cetera. Why was it so unrealistic to think that the Soviet Union did have expansionist visions for spreading a specific way of life across the globe.

He essentially gave subsequent generations of American liberal historians all the words to use, the entire kind of ideological framework to use about what Soviet threat was about. He used the word virus, malignant parasite, and other helpful things to understand Soviet threat. But if we go beyond all this, ask a question, okay, malignant parasite on what parasite on

healthy capitalist liberal society. That again, the thesis is, it is liberal capitalism that collapsed in the nineteen thirties and above all in Europe, above all in Germany, but also in other countries. And maybe America can restore this capitalism to its greatness. But maybe not, because at the end of the Long Telegram, Canon has doubts. Canon says we should contain communists, but not to such an extent that we in America would ourselves turn into a garrison state.

So his theory that in this huge effort to contain communism, America might itself change its nature and stop being liberal capitalist society and would become a garrison state. So, you know, that's a sort of sense of uncertainty. But later this sense of uncertainty was dropped, particularly in the sixties with this point you know, Kenny diesque kind of message and

then great Society and so on and so forth. So it's very important again I repeat, when you read about the Cold War to ask a question when exactly in what phase of the Cold War are you and what kind of questions you raise about this phase, because it's for decades, for decades, so that uncertainty about capitalism began to pass in Europe and you have experienced, you know, a moment of you know, huge economic wonder at the

end of the fifties and in the sixties. But then the colonization started and that uncertainty what would happen to the global South resurfaced. That the fact that all these countries like India and China, of course, became communists famously in nineteen forty nine. So that always loomed large in the imagination of Americans, is that have China turned communism and not you know, followed that great, unique and correct American way. Maybe others would take this way of misdevelopment.

It's interesting that all American diplomats and pundits and experts use that or misdevelopment when they spoke about Soviet socialism during the fifties and the sixties. So when you began to pile up, well, what about Afghanistan, what about you know this or that you're already kind of continuing into extrapolating the timeline into the future. My answer to you would be, don't do it, because we have a conflict.

It started in the late forties. It created a certain kind of deadlock, a sense of deadlock, a long battle that no one knew how to win. And one horrible perspective of that deadlock was the possibility of a nuclear war. Don't forget this is why you mentioned the Cuban missile crisis.

The Cuban missile crisis showed and when both sides faced that prospect of a term a nuclear war, both sides, No matter how more bombs and missiles and bombers the United States had in nineteen sixty two, it had seventeen times more than the Soviet Union, no matter that both sides preferred to step back, and aside from a confrontation,

nobody knew how this conflict would end. So this conflict continued for decade after decade and after decade, which is the nature of any conflict that cannot end in the decisive victory, and when both sides have existential reasons not to raise up their hands sort of.

So I'm going to skip to something else that you just mentioned, but can you talk a little bit more about the Cold War experience in a place like India, Because again, so much of the focus tends to be on the US versus Russia for obvious reasons, but there was a lot going on in other parts of the world as well, and some would argue that, you know, some countries were even successful in sort of exploiting the tension between the US and Russia for their own advantage.

conflict between the West and the East. But also they did seriously expect to get what they wanted, a kind of mixed model, something from socialism, something from free entrepreneurship and decide for themselves what is best to them. So, you know, in the late fifties and in the sixties, you see the Indians kind of, you know, turning to Moscow and asking Moscow help us with that, for instance, to build a steel mill, and turning to America and

telling Americas, oh it, can you help with that? So they played on both sides, and I think it was a right choice. So that lasted actually into the early eighties until the emergence of the global liberal capitalist system that we live with today, which is I think is crumbling before our eyes today. But anyway, that system was emerging in the seventies and eighties. Read the fourth part of my book. It's about that emergence of that system.

And at that time people of non allied movement, like Indians, like Brazilians, like others, they began to feel the pinch of that system. And all of a sudden they discovered the experiments with expert substitution failed, that there was a huge transnational force that dictated them the rules above all, the rules of how get resources, how to get money, how to get loans and credits, and that was the system that they totally associated with American influence, with the

World Bank, with IMF. But it was broader than that. It was a global capitalist system that began to emerge during the seventies, something that theorists would call today's Washington consensus. And it was also part of the call of the war. Like I mentioned several things, that geopolitical context over Europe, decolonization and now this and all those huge transnational global developments influenced the call war and they influenced the choices of countries like India. Of course, I want.

but eventually communism will win out. To what degree did the sort of existence of the nuclear bomb or the development of the nuclear bomb undermine that story that history will not end. Human will not end necessarily with communist victory. History could end with all of humanity simply being erased in the nuclear war. And how much did this sort of opening up of this other possible path through which human history could unfold sort of shake that underlying faith and the original story.

debate was impossible. And yet there were some elements of debate and discussion about nuclear weapons, which I write about in my book, from some likely corners, like nuclear physicists, who warned, for instance, the leadership in Moscow leadership in nineteen fifty four, that the invention of terminnuclear weapons makes

the end of the entire humanity possible. And the party leaders immediately reproached them and squashed the debate because their view was, hey, you know, our calonical explanation is that it's not humanity, it's capitalism that will perish. But then other unlikely candidates like it. Among them a chess champion between Nick, who I cited my book, began to write to the party leaders, wait a minute, I'm a communist

member myself, but I don't want humanity to perish. This is my way of reconciling the two goals, keeping peace and making communism a peaceful outcome of the competition between the two systems. So suddenly that guy between, thinking very logically, pointed to the main problem of the Marxist Leninist approach that it always had preached a violent andent of capitalism, some kind of a revolution, and then of course the victory of communism as a result of another imperialist war.

But this imperialist war is no longer possible because of the existence of certain nuclear weapons. So ultimately, Schoff, not being very theoretical guy but kind of very instinctive politician, came up with his solution to this debate and basically said, or the forces of socialism was strong enough. He of course meant above all the Soviet Union in China strong enough to prevent another war that imperialists otherwise want to unleash,

and therefore we'll proceed to communism, but peacefully. So he just basically squared the circle, and then the idiocratic bureaucracy followed this lead. And then what you have is Dayton't. Then what you have is daytont and arms control. That was the major outcome of that ideological reconciliation that the Soviet leadership, and particularly the guy after Cruse Schevnev said,

you know, but we want peace. We don't renounce how ideological belief that capitalists would perish and communists would triumph, But we have to do it peacefully. Our main duty is to struggle for peace, and in the old days, let's say, twenty years earlier, such guys like Brezhnev would have been denounced as yeah, I don't know he read its revisionists, I don't know. But in the seventies that

was all right. So in a sense, that ideological innovation opened the way for Dayton peaceful policies by Brezhnev, and with all kinds of good consequences for Europe, with the American Soviet Dayton flourishing briefly but flourishing under Nixon, and looking backwards, you begin to realize that without this period of Breshnev and struggle for peace, otherwise you wouldn't have

had Garbachev. And of course, without Garbachev in the late eighties, from eighty five to nineteen ninety one, you cannot imagine the end of such conflict as the Cold War, because Garbachev was a major part and then single handedly did many things that made the end of this conflict possible thinkable, and actually it happened.

a cold war. So when you hear someone say, oh, this is the new Cold war between the US and China. What is your immediate reaction.

primarily because of the existence of nuclear weapons, never turn hot. Well, if you take this kind of abstract, generic approach, then you may say, oh, you're not a cold war, and probably because of the existence of nuclear weapons, if we're lucky, we'll have a series of the Cold War into eternity. Right.

But I'm not a fan of this approach. I'm much more into specific historical interpretation of the Cold War, which I said was above all a contact between the two ways of modernization capitalism and non capitalism called socialism and a capitalist one that you know, all rounds of that competition handily, and this is why essentially the Cold War ended the way it ended. But where are we now between the United States and China. It's much more narrow

in really more geopolitical context. Who would be the top in the hierarchy of capitalist powers. Yes, somebody would say, oh, it's about freedom versus lack freedom of authoritarianism in China. But it's a much weaker argument really in my view. A because China evolves in its own way, you know, through hundreds and hundreds of years. But nobody said that ultimately China would not begin to vote and have political parties. Who knows, maybe in two hundred years China will develop

into some sort of democracies. I would never say no to that. My approach is more specific that for now, I don't believe we are facing as profound, as dangerous, as essentialist and existential conflict as the Cold War had been, particularly in the first two decades of the Cold War between nineteen forty seven, let's say, nineteen sixty two, sixty sixty eight, whatever. So this is my answer to the question. There as a conflict, but I would hesitate to call

it the Cold War. However, however, we should all learn from forty years of Cold War history to make this Sino American conflict manageable or at least more manageable. And I have a few ideas about this. By just looking at this Soviet American interaction during the previous major conflict.

One idea is, of course diplomacy should work. And I'm always struck how important was diplomacy even at the worst moments of the Cold War, even at the time of McCarthyism in the United States, even at the time, not to mention, the time of the Cuban Missi crisis, when Kennedy and Khrushov exchanged all those famous messages that ultimately led to the peaceful outcome of the crisis. So diplomacy

is hugely important. At the second point I want to make about the Sino American confrontation today that the danger of tunnel vision. People should learn to think outside the box. There was in the Cold War so many people who said they cannot be any way of talking to those Communists, to those Ruskies, And there were many hardliners in the Soviet Union who never wanted to trust to talk to

the Americans. And yet there were always people thinking outside the box and finding cultural, diplomatic and other ways of interaction. That's really important. At third observation, some people would say tariffs, economic sanctions, and arms race would solve this conflict today between China and the United States. I would say the entire Cold War actually shows that it was nonsense. Arms race did not solve political sources of confrontation between the

Soviet Union and the United States. The development of capital and the development of what global economy solved that conflict, the fundamental underlining issues of that conflict. So if the United States wants to out spend China more sophisticated weaponry AI intelligence to manage the weaponry, that's another deadlock. That's that's like forgetting fundamental lessons of history. And finally, you know,

look at the cover of my book Falling Domino. One major problem of Cold War mentality, particularly on the American side, but also on the Soviet side of course, was thinking, once we make this one concession anywhere, there will be the falling Domino effect, and that will be the end of our credibility, the end of our position, That will be the end of our whole global position in the world, in our cap So what did the Americans get by following this falling Domino theory? They ended up in Vietnam.

And what did the Soviets gain by going along this line? They actually collapsed at the end of it. So it's not a good way. It's not a good way to resurrect the falling domino mentality by saying, if God forbid, if China moves against this island somewhere, you know, and we do not defend this island by military force, then that's the end of the world. We know, it's a falling domino. It's a classic falling domino theory.

I thought these were just unalloyed goods. And one of the things, you know, I've been thinking about it recently again actually in current geopolitical context, because just a week or two ago, Trump was in the golf and he, you know, made all these agreements and we're gonna sell lots of semiconductors to golf countries and so forth. You know, Saudi Arabia still does a lot of executions by beheading and things that would horrify people in the United States.

All kinds of things in the human rights realm that would horrify people in the United States, but we could still do business with them. We could still sell them a lot of semiconductors, by their oil and so forth. One of the things you point out in your book is the role of human rights groups at times throughout this story of undermining, det haunt and sort of when we were having these sort of softer moments that ultimately the human rights groups in the West, they were not

helpful on that front. Could this be a more productive, peaceful path in the United States to perhaps be more willing to just accept, you know what, we can do business with countries. We can sell arms and chips, and we don't have to worry. It's just not our business how they conduct their internal affairs.

happening inside the Soviet Union. To begin with, there was a group, very small groups of human rights defenders called dissidents in the Soviet Union that evoked huge admiration in American societies as sort of good Russians versus evil Russians. You know, people whose names were household names at the time and few people remember them now, like you know, Alexander Soldier, Niitsen, Andre Sacharov and another, you know, great

names at the time. And then came the issue of Jewish Emmy Grace, who wanted to leave the Sovie Union to go to Israel or to go to other countries, and American Jewish groups who faced discrimination at home and wanted to sort of resert themselves. At the same time at home, they found a great cause, a good cause inside the Soviet Union to help their brethren to emigrate from the Soviet Unions. So that was the true emergence

of the human rights movement in the United States. That conflated without a great currents that already been there, like civil rights movements and anti racist movements and feminist movements, you know, and environment movements. That was a great moment in American history. So what happened. I think it would be foolish on anybody's part to blame human rights movements for undermining the tent Because Dayton was very shaky and

very very fragile thing to begin with. But Dayton was in a sense that Soviets were doubly unlucky during the seventies because they thought that with a sheer agreement on the equality of armaments and the agreement tongue like taming the arms race, they would create the foundation for the ecton And that was really really naive to think so, because again back to one of my points, arms races or taming arms races, taming arms racist is good, but

arms racists in asums, they're crucial to solving real political issues. So these arms are agreements that the sovice were so proud of, Well, they didn't play any role in the end. What played the role was human rights, a movement inside the United States that legitimized Acton in the eyes of millions of Americans. Plus of course there were other issues dealing to decolonization in Africa of all of the Portuguese Empire.

And so it's jumped in immediately, guided by their Marxist Leninist kind of fraternity, solidarity, mentality and error and American herdliners that you see they unchanging, they keep roiling it, you know, they keep on the mining global stability and whatever they can. And there were other things as well, so which sadly led the Soviets to their own falling Domino mindset and overreaction in Afghanistan that you mentioned. So everything was a reaction to something, but I would place

the rise of human rights in context. What indubitably happened, however, then, was that people like President Carter and then President Reagan quickly realized that this is a moral cause to follow, and it also was expedient course politically because by championing global human rights campaigns, the United States were back as a leader of the free world, and they were back with much more credentials, like finally being not only the leaders of the free world, but the leaders of the

just world, which was the usually the clay is something claimed by the Soviet Union right in earlier years. You know, the Soviet Union always was against the racism, against the Jim Crow, you know, colonialism, And suddenly the United States grabbed all of that and redirected it against the Soviet unter set. And you Rooskies are actually you know, he colonizes you authoritarians. You know, you don't let your people

emigrate and all that. So it was a decisive ideological turning point in the Cold War, which the Soviets at first didn't realize was that way, and then later they became pathetically defensive and just couldn't find a good way to deal with that until Gorbachev finally said during his presidency, let's not be afraid of human rights. Let's basically accept that we also can be free in just society, and he began to liberalize the Soviet society with the outcome that we already know.

transition from communism to capitalism. So I'm just very curious what your personal experience was, and I guess what the sort of messaging was to the Russian population about that huge transition and transformation.

to Soviet audience through television. It wasn't like, you know, something that foreign stations did. It was the Soviet television began to convey this information about the much better life in the West. So all pillars of Soviet mindset, sort of Soviet worldview, began to collapse simultaneously, and it led to several faithful consequences. First was that sense of cynicism, dejection of any certainty, any moral, any kind of ethical certainties in the society, which was accompanied by huge ways

of domestic crime and you know, violence, and mostly economic violence. Second, that was this kind of realization, well, if capitalism is the only way for humanity to exist and evolve. Anything

to gain money, to make profit is allowed. So again the combination of collapse of ethical norms with sudden spread of capitalist practices led to that you know, wild East mentality, much more so than the Wild West was in America, I would say, And ultimately the void was filled by nationalism or some kind of at least, and I wouldn't say totally filled, but you know, some kind of expectation that if everything collapses around me, it means that either I choose my family and myself as the only sort

of bulwark in the future, or I would believe in another super ego, which is nation nationalists. And so the nationalist and ethnic conflicts sprung up immediately as Gorbachev began to dismantle the old sort of the old mentality, see

the old system and the Soviet Union. And it was highly dangerous and highly destructive, and of course, in part those nationalists humilitated against the past and past grievances in you know, all the people killed by Stalin and Lenin and you know all that, But they also kind of satisfied the new need for a renewed sense of identity. So I used to think that the Soviet Collapse was

relatively peaceful until the current war in Ukraine. Because clearly, you know, this new wave of Russian nationalism and is linked to the continuing lack of idea, continuing void in the heart of Russia. Why so many changes happened and what's the meaning of those changes? So it was possible, as it turned out, as I'm saying with deep sadness, for the leader of Russia to fill that tremendous vacuum with another refurbished idea of Russian imperial, imperial and national domination.

you know, I want to ask one last question. The way you depicted and also, especially in your previous book Collapse, you're pretty hard on Gorbachev and you sort of castigate him at times for his unwillingness to use force at times. But you know, one of the things that you could see in this book is that the collapse of the

Warsaw Pact there was a big economic element. The Soviet Union could no longer supply cheap oil to East Germany and other countries and so forth, and that the economic dysfunction of the Soviet Union played a significant role in the failure to keep those military allies on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But then you sort of say, Gorbachev unilaterally disarmed more or less the USSR. There was an unforced collapse, that it was sort of an internal choice.

Why shouldn't we assume that the economic dysfunction that led to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, which you acknowledge, would not have eventually led to the disintegration of the USSR itself and the emergence of all these countries pursuing some conception of freedom and national identity.

sovereignty and all that. But in other ways, to look back at history and see the perils and danger of sudden collapses, sudden collapses of empires, we see essentially the tremendous instability in Europe paving the way too fascist and Nazi dictatorships rooted in a sudden collapse of empires as

a result of World War One. So the suddenness of this collapse, the fact that they create this immense vacuum and destroy the old common identities and common links, immense common links between different ethnic groups and across different ethnic groups. This is a huge dangerous moment. And in fact I tried to strike a balance and collapse, looking at both sides, but sort of probably knowing what would follow after Garbachev.

Maybe I overdo the second. I'm hard on Garbachev because he raised expectations tremendously, and I was among his followers, and millions of people looked up to him full leadership. And when particularly he tremendous changes in the late eighty eight eighty nine, not right away, you know, the first two years were very kind of, very frustrating. I remember that. But then he made that huge leap forward, hugely forward, and that leap forward contained elements of the future collapse

because it had many disguided premises. He believed in Leninism, he believed in that sort of many things that he should believed in, but he did. But then by taking this sleep, Gorbachev kind of got frozen. In the process of this sleep, he suddenly lost his initiative. He became a famously you know, slow or infamously slow in taking other steps. So with such tremendous changes, you have to

maintain a momentum or you lose it to others. And he lost that momentum to the Yeltsin, to the Russian sort of leader who essentially pulled Russia from under Gorbachev and and destroyed the so Union, not the Balls, not Georgian,

it's not Ukraine. He has destroyed so Uni Elson did in my view, So by looking at this story, I sort of I'm harsh on the later Gorbachev because the book is mostly about three years eighty nine nineteen ninety one, during which Gorbachev had already done his greatest kind of leap into the future and got scared someone you know, got you know, outgunned by his arrival. So my harshness on Gorbachev, maybe he's guided by the fact that I would very much preferred him to succeed because other options

were very, very very clear for us. Now what other options led to, you know, for those who admired and Washington people admired Jelson and thought that Gorbachev was still a Communist. True, Elson turned into anti communists, but look, it was Elson who gave us the current Kremlin leader. After all.

you should. And I think one of the important takeaways from that conversation and from other conversations that we've had in the past, is this idea of like, just how big an existential crisis the collapse of the Soviet Union actually was for Russia and Vlad's point that you ended up replacing the communist ideology with nationalism. I mean, we are still living through the consequences of all of that.

The US China relationship has, especially in the last you know, thirty years, forty years whatever, has really been driven by the business community, yeah, specifically, which sort of makes it a very different story to the Cold War, and it just has not been about that sort of ideological blog per se.

So while you know, obviously China wants to expand its influence, it seems like, you know, it does it by building factories and stuff like that and expanding its economic footprint much more than asking its trading partners to you know, commit to its specific model.

could have avoided the Cold War. If we just had some sort of steel manufacturing off competition between the great world powers, and whoever made the best steel would be declared the winner and their economic model would be, you know, embraced by the rest of the world. We should have gone down that route.