White supremacists are supposed to be concerned with maintaining and preserving the supremacy of the white race, whatever that may be, over other variants of the human species which, according to white supremacists, are inferior. So why do we see lately white supremacists, including the proud boys, attacking LGBTQIA plus people?  The short answer is reaction formation. Thank you for listening. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Stay here. I'm going to explain everything to you. Don't run away.  There are two psychological defense mechanisms that laymen find very difficult to comprehend and even many scholars and psychologists. It's difficult to wrap your mind around these defense mechanisms because they are counter-intuitive and exceedingly convoluted. Some of them operate in the unconscious, some of them operate in the interface between conscious and unconscious.  And today we're going to discuss reaction formation. The other defense mechanism is projective identification. And as usual, I have several videos about projective identification that I encourage you to look for. Go to the magnifying glass. If you're on a PC or a laptop, go to my channel. There's a magnifying glass symbol. Click on it and search the channel for projective identification. If you're on a smartphone, click on the downward arrow on the right hand side. It will roll down and you will see search. Click on the search, of course, and search for projective identification. Today we are not dealing with projective identification. We will be dealing with reaction formation.  You can be honest with yourself and say, well, probably I'm homosexual or bisexual, and I'm going to try it out and I'm going to see if it fits me.  So Freud said that men who have a prejudice against homosexual, but an ostentatious prejudice in your face, public, and make a big deal out of it, actually are defending against their own homosexual tendencies and feelings by adopting a harsh anti-homosexual attitude in order to convince themselves, first of all, that they are not homosexual, they're heterosexual, and then to convince everyone else. It's like, if I'm attacking homosexual, how can I be homosexual?  What about the dutiful daughter who loves her mother? And she loves her mother very overtly, very ostentatiously.     So there are two ways to go about it. You can go no contact with your mother, which I've done 26 years ago, or you can pretend and lie and deceive yourself into believing that you actually love your mother, inordinately and exceedingly.  It's a defense and this is what reaction formation is all about, behaving in a way which denies hidden feelings and motivations which are unacceptable to you, feelings and motivations which you reject in you. Now projection is very similar to this. There are parts of you that you reject and resent and don't accept and so you attribute them to other people. You project them onto other people. But reaction formation is not only about the passive attribution of elements of your own personality to other people. You're stingy, so you say other people are stingy. You're hateful, you say they are hateful. So this is projection. But this is passive. This is merely observation. Reaction formation couples projection with action, behavior, choices, decisions, the very manifestations and protestations of innocence and of cleanliness. So where does all this come from? Reaction formation clinically is what we call a fixation. Fixation is an idea that is in your consciousness and effect and emotion, a desire that is in your consciousness and you can't get rid of it.  So you cannot expunge these fixations. Fixations are there to stay. And so these desires, these ideas, these effects or emotions, they are overt. They are in consciousness. You're aware of them. You promulgate them. You announce them. You share them with others. You make sure everyone knows about these ideas or emotions or beliefs or desires. But they are false. It's not that you're lying to other people.    So you need to put on a facade, which is the exact opposite of these feared, subterranean, surreptitious, unconscious impulses. A mother, for example.  That's why there is the phenomenon of post-natal depression. Many women regard the child as an intrusion, an annoyance. They are driven crazy by the child's insistent demand, especially in the first year, by his crying. The child becomes unwanted.  So what such a mother does, she begins to feel guilty and she becomes exactly the opposite.  Enraged by the child's consistent demands. It's another example of reaction formation. Reaction formation was first proposed as usual by Simon Freud. It was in German Reaktions Bildung.  It's a defense mechanism affiliated with the ego. Emotions, impulses, beliefs, ideas, even images, effects which are anxiety producing because they are, for example, socially unacceptable or because they are dangerous or risky. These kind of impulses, these kind of ideas and beliefs and emotions and so on and so forth have to be controlled, have to be mastered. It's very frightening to have lurking in your unconscious a time bomb, a time bomb which is ego dystonic, ego incongruent. In other words, a time bomb which defies everything you believe yourself to be.  It's terrifying. You need to control it. You need to master it. You need to repress it. You need to suppress it. You need to convert it and reframe it and transform it or do something with it. You need to do something with it because one of the things about time bombs, ultimately they explode. And in reaction formation, we muster these forbidden hidden impulses by exaggerating in the opposite direction. If I'm a latent homosexual, I will be a macho womanizer and I will show everyone there's not a trace or a hint of homosexuality.   Behavioral negation of these forbidden impulses. It's the same with the white supremacists. They're attacking LGBTQIA because, for example, bromance is very common in these male only or male mostly groups. There are strong sexual dynamics in these groups, denied, repressed, disavowed. These men are men's men. They are machos. They are with tattoos. They are with muscles. They're bodybuilding. They have weapons, weapons which are essentially phallic symbols, extensions of you know what. This is all about sexuality ultimately. And so no wonder they're attacking people with alternative sexualities because they're terrified of the possibility or the potential for such alternative sexualities inside themselves.  It is on the same level, level three, with dissociation, displacement, intellectualization, repression, and so on and so forth. A text about reaction formation. The instincts and their derivatives may be arranged as pairs of opposites, life versus death, construction versus destruction, action versus passivity, dominance versus submission, and so forth. When one of the instincts produces anxiety by exerting pressure on the ego either directly or by way of the superego, the ego may try to sidetrack the offending impulse by concentrating upon its opposite. For example, if feelings of hate towards another person make the hater feel anxious, the hater's ego can facilitate the flow of love over an ostentatious love to conceal the hostility. So this is the foundational text about reaction formation. When we witness behaviors such as the ones recently with white supremacists, homophobic groups, and inside families, dynamics inside families, when we witness reaction formation, we can safely assume that the original rejected, resented fear impulse does not vanish. It persists. The reaction formation doesn't make you less homosexual, less hateful, less resentful.  Reaction formation doesn't remove these from consciousness, it just pushes these forbidden fruits into the unconscious and there they persist in the original form, which is typically infantile.   Sublimation is about converting your urges and drives and impulses into socially acceptable forms and formats, but there's no way to do that and in many societies there's no way to be gay or transgender in socially acceptable, in a socially acceptable manner. Societies, they're frown upon this. So these impulses, they are suppressed and the overt behavior, the reactive formative behavior, I am not a homosexual, look, look how much of a heterosexual I am, I have another woman every week, see how much, how much I'm not a homosexual, this is the overt behavior. This reaction formation doesn't substitute for the underlying latent homosexuality.  They exist under the surface, under the veneer, under the exterior of the observable behavior. So this is not a process of substitution, it's not even a process of displacement, it's a process of masking and masking it not only from other people, but first and foremost masking it from yourself, masking it from your own awareness, from your own consciousness.  This is about convincing yourself first and foremost. The existence of reaction formation is very difficult to diagnose, but one very important hallmark is it's over the top, it's exaggerated, it involves aggression and violence and compulsivity, compulsiveness and inflexibility. So we have, for example, the text that reactive love protests too much. It is overdone, extravagant, showing and affected. It is counterfeit and is usually easily detected. Another feature of a reaction formation is its compulsiveness. A person who is defending himself against anxiety cannot deviate from expressing the opposite of what he really feels. His love, for instance, is not flexible, it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do, rather it must be constantly on display, as if any failure to exhibit it would cause the contrary feeling, the lurking feeling, to come to the surface. So it's both rigid and thespian ostentations, public for public consumption. And the number one audience is the person himself or herself. She needs to convince herself that she doesn't hate the overbearing and domineering father, he needs to convince himself that he is not attracted to men. She needs to convince herself that she doesn't hate her newborn baby because the newborn baby has taken her life away from her. So to do all this, they behave in ways which signify and denote the exact opposite. Reaction formation is counterintuitive in the sense that the behavior and the psychological reality don't match. It's a camouflage, it's a disguise, but it's not a lie in the sense that the person engaging in reaction formation is not actively gaslighting or actively lying.  He's doing this because he wants to convince himself. And so solicitude may be a reaction formation against cruelty, cleanliness being obsessively, compulsively clean and neat against actually some attraction to dirt or to unclean sexual practices. Pacifism can be a reaction formation against sadism and aggression. As one of the texts says, high ideals of virtue and goodness may be reaction formations against primitive object investment, emotionally investment in primitive objects. This virtue, this goodness, these ideals are not realistic values that are capable of being lived up to. Romantic notions of chastity and purity may mask crude sexual desires. Altruism may hide selfishness, piety may conceal sinfulness. A phobia is an example of a reaction formation. The person wants that which he fears the most. He's not afraid of the object, he's afraid of the wish for the object. The reactive fear prevents the dreaded wish from being fulfilled. It's a very interesting insight about phobia. So reaction formation is used by professional psychologists and professors of psychology to explain many responses to external threats, but also to internal anxieties. And reaction formation is a breach. Very often something outside that symbolizes your inner anxiety, something outside that ratifies what you fear of most. You're afraid of something and then there's an object or a person or a place or an institution outside that ratifies, symbolizes and bodies your greatest fear about yourself. So of course this creates a lot of aggression. Stokholm syndrome, for example, that's when the hostage kidnapped, the kidnapping hostage, the victim, falls in love with the kidnapper.  But it's very dangerous to show this to the kidnapper because he may shoot you in the head. So this creates a reaction formation. Rather than show the kidnapper your true feelings about him, you show him that you're in love with him. The kidnapper has complete power over you. It would be extremely unwise and irrational to express your true emotions, so you repress them, you deny them, you delete them and instead you engage in behavior that signals exactly the opposite.  Powerless and vulnerable people, for example there have been studies of people inmates in Nazi concentration camps. How these people, the victims, the Holocaust victims, bonded with guards. They were even collecting objects discarded by SS officers.  It's very primitive. It's a form of magic. Indeed reaction formation involves magical thinking. If I behave externally in a certain way it's going to affect my mind. It's going to delete what's bothering me. It's going to eliminate what I'm afraid of and it's going to obliterate any trace of that which I do not want to be. So it's a kind of reverse magical thinking. In classic magical thinking there is the mistaken belief that your mind can change the world. In reverse magical thinking there's a mistaken belief that if you act in a certain way in the world it will change your mind. And so the mechanism of reaction formation is very prevalent in obsessions. What is an obsession? Obsession is a behavior. Obsession compulsion. It's a behavior. It's a ritual. It's like if I engage in this ritual nothing bad will happen to me. If I do, if I repeat this sequence of actions, my loved ones, my nearest and dearest will not be harmed. This is the essence of obsession and this sense of obsession is another form of reaction formation. During the formation of the ego, and again, ego is a metaphor. No one captured an ego, no one spoke to an ego, and no one traveled with an ego on an airplane. Ego is a metaphor, but a useful metaphor. I find it to be a useful metaphor. So during the formation of the ego, in other words during the formation of our interface with the world, when we begin as children we begin to notice the world. We begin to venture out into the world and we do this by developing a reality testing. So when the ego is formed, there's a lot of reaction formation. Because children engage in magic. Taking on the world is a very grandiose act, saying goodbye to mommy is the most terrifying traumatic thing. And we know that religions and magic are defenses against trauma, against fear, against catastrophe. All the primitive religions are forms of reaction formation. Primitive religions and actually not so primitive religions, like monotheistic religions. What are we talking about? What is a religion? A religion is a set of behaviors and you're telling yourself, if I were behaving a certain way, nothing bad will happen to me. If I behave in a certain way, I will have reformed myself. I will have changed. Had I behaved in a certain way, I would be different. So religion and therapy for this matter, psychotherapy, these are all forms of, let's call them sublimated reaction formations, where action or a series of prescribed ritualistic actions are supposed to bring about internal transformation which would render you happier, more ego-dystonic, ego-syntonic, will remove the parts of you that you're not comfortable with. And so obsessive personality disorders very easily bleed into practices such as religion and we all know the obsessive religious person. We all met one or we all have the misfortune of having one in the family. Reaction formation may be more common among men than among women but we do have studies among women as well.   After casual sex, majority of women actually feel bad, bad in one way or another and so a possible reaction formation is to say, I actually don't like sex.  I actually don't want sex. I'm in control of my sexuality. I can go abstinent or celibate for decades. I don't need sex. It's a reaction formation. It's behaving in a way which defines the truth and the truth is you're very sexual. You want to have sex, even with strangers. You're socially unrestricted. You're promiscuous, denying promiscuity by becoming frigid, by becoming not interested in sex or by extension, not interested in men.  Their genitalia were totally autonomous. Their genitalia, their body wanted sex. Similarly, when we tested white people, white people means Caucasians. White people who claim to be non-racist, egalitarian, pacifist, humanity-loving people, tree-huggers and I don't know what, actually these people scored higher for racist tendencies. Recent studies by Gabae, others in British Columbia and so on, show that activists in social movements are actually very high on the narcissistic and psychopathic spectrum. You heard me well. I'm going to repeat this. Activists in victimhood movements, social activists are actually high on narcissistic and psychopathic measures. So, social activism is a form of reaction formation. I'm a psychopath and maybe I don't feel good with it or maybe I hit rock bottom or maybe I don't want to be a psychopath anymore. It's not working for me. The way out is to be a social activist, to be the exact opposite of a psychopath, openly, publicly, overtly, ostentatiously become a humanity lover, become the great equalizer of the races. Black lives matter, me too. So, but actually when we test these people, they are much higher in terms of racist tendencies than the average population. But we also found out that these very people who are at heart, deep inside, seriously racist, give more money to African-American panhandlers and beggars than they do to white beggars and panhandlers. That's their way of reaction, that's their reaction formation. You see, I'm giving money to African Americans in need, giving money to African-American, homeless, so that proves that I'm not a racist. When actually, deep inside, they are. Anna Freud said that reaction formation is believing the opposite.  It goes beyond denial. It's not about denial. It's to behave in the opposite way to what you really think and what you really feel, thereby suppressing it to the point that you no longer feel it and no longer think it because you convince yourself of the big lie. These are conscious behaviors. Reaction formation is a set of conscious behaviors intended to overcompensate for an anxiety. The person feels anxiety regarding socially unacceptable, unconscious thoughts and emotions. Reaction formation is exaggerated, is showy, is compulsive, and it keeps the person satisfied because it deceives the so-called ego. It falsifies the reality testing.  I'm not a homosexual. I'm not hateful. I'm not aggressive. But that's, of course, deceitful. If a patient comes to you and he says, I strongly believe in something and it becomes very angry when you defy him or when you disagree with him and he goes on and on and it's almost obsessive. He can't stop. That's the only thing he talks about all the time. You can rest ashore. That's exactly who he is. If he goes on and on and on about promiscuity, he's promiscuous.  And if he attacks LGBTQIA and all the other letters, he probably has latent homosexual tendencies. He's a latent gay, hidden, lurking, suppressed, but there. Sometimes these occult, these submerged and subsumed urges and emotions come to the surface. Sometimes even reaction formation is not enough and these people want to do something. They want to say something. This is especially common under the influence when alcohol is consumed or some other types of drugs. And then these people do or say something that is effectively the opposite of how they present themselves to the world.  You can have a rabid humanizer who can never commit himself and he goes from one woman to another to another to another.  These are cracks in the reaction formation facade. Reaction formation slips a bit like a mask. The mask slips. The reality appears and this immediately provokes enormous anxiety and the anxiety is composed of two parts. Self-rejection on the one hand. Oh my god, I slept with the men.   It's harrowing, terrifying and the second element in the anxiety is the expectation of social punishment, social sanction, excommunication, mockery, criticism being cancelled. If you fear of being criticized for something, you will visibly act in a way that shows that you are a long way from this kind of behavior or speech. If you're afraid to be honest, because being honest and politically incorrect carries a social price tag, over the years you will convince yourself otherwise.  It will become you where the person uses excessive behavior, for example exaggerated friendliness is actually feeling unfriendly, where you can judge the true core of a person by observing the exaggerated behaviors. Someone who is angry with a co-worker ends up being particularly courteous and friendly towards this co-worker.   It's a cover-up. It's a cover-up for something that is unacceptable in you by adopting the opposite stance, opposition, and it's distinct from projection, as I said, and so Freud called it overboarding. The person is going overboard in one direction to distract himself and us and to cover up for something unwanted in the other direction, so you're afraid of your own aggression, you become a pacifist and so these are extreme patterns. They appear in paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and because they are seamlessly integrated with mental illness or some forms of mental illness, I just mentioned paranoia and so on, people who engage in reaction formation to a very large degree begin to feel that something is wrong, begin to feel ego-distony, begin to feel discomfort with themselves, they begin to actually doubt and question themselves, so people who engage in reaction formation sometimes flip, they change on a dime and overnight, they become the exact opposite when they had been preaching and hectoring over a lifetime. The zealous homophobe will suddenly out and become homosexual. The loving daughter will suddenly rebel and openly declare her hatred over her father and abandon him. These flips, these massive changes in the totality of the personality, the whole repertory of behaviors is a powerful indicator of the existence of reaction formation and so what to do with such people? How to cope for example with these white supremacists? One way is to, it's like in Judo I think or Jiu-Jitsu I have to ask Richard Granon, where he used the momentum of the opponent to win over. So one way is to agree actually with the reaction formation, to exaggerate the exaggeration, to go with and to render it a caricature so that even the person who engages in the reaction formation will recoil because he will suddenly see the comic nature of his own defensive behaviors, positions and speech acts, exaggerate, exaggerate it over the top reaction formation to render it utterly unacceptable and you know the butt of mockery. This exposes the underlying tendencies. So when you do this you should at the same time legitimize, legitimize that which the reaction formation is intended to conceal.  Is there something wrong with it? Why do you think it's wrong? I mean you deconstruct, you deconstruct the narrative legitimizing the hidden impulse, legitimizing the covert, suppressed, repressed, ignored part, denied part. The reaction formation is in many ways a cry for help actually. It's like saying I can't be myself, I have to be someone else. So you have to show that person that some of his behavior, some of the reaction formation is actually socially unacceptable and if he were to adopt his true, his authentic self, he would be much more acceptable socially than what is doing now.  Now that's reaction formation. It's easy to demonstrate that this is much less socially acceptable than actually admitting your transgender tendencies. So when in communication with these people you need to show them the reaction formation is non-sustainable because you know how long can you carry out this act and how long can you deceive yourself and still trust it and you have to show them that reaction formation is almost always less acceptable in society than the alternative of admitting who you truly are and how you truly feel. Then you need to legitimize it. You need to give them space. You need to listen to their ideas. You need to validate their identity. You need to embrace and accept. You need to react against the undesirable pattern of reaction formation but help them to create their own way and show them that if they were true to themselves this would actually be far less undesirable than the reaction formation.  You need to provide a supportive environment. You need them to feel safe to admit and to accept what is happening to them and so defense mechanisms are symptoms of a problem with reality, could be external reality, could be internal reality but there's a problem with coping with reality. You need to allow them to evolve in a safe containing environment the capacity to cope with reality. Never confront someone with reaction formation head on. It will only entrench him in his position. He will feel a lot more threatened and you will you will have lost him. That's why I never argue with a conspiracy theorist you know with reason or try to dismantle or deconstruct his nonsense. It's a wrong way to go about it. People become conspiracy theorists and they have reacted formation because they are in distress and they don't need you to add to their distress and they don't need you to put them down. That's nobody's all about. Show them that their position is socially unacceptable, more socially unacceptable than who they really are and how they truly feel and show them that their real feelings are legitimate and acceptable. I want to refer you to two articles they're pretty foundational articles published decades ago. Juni in 9th Juni J. U. N. I. in 1981 theoretical foundations of reaction formation as a defense mechanism was published in genetic psychology monographs volume 104 the abstract says among the defense mechanisms reaction formation is considered by the author to be the most stable pervading the entire personality structure. The source of the defensive energy is explored within the context of drive theory paralleling superego development and the processes of functional autonomy of other drive derivatives. The dynamics of balancing affect against behavior are analyzed with reference to the adaptive function of compulsion. Reaction formation is shown to relate closely to repression in its capacity for comprehensive impulse negation. The centrality of reaction formation within the constellation of of characterology is underlined. It's an interesting article although it's a bit too Freudian for me there are too many references to the anal phase and all kinds of psychosexual phases of development but still I think the author got many many things right or actually he got it right first and we still teach we still teach and propagate many of the insights in this article. The second article was published in Journal of Personality in January 2002. It was written by authored by Roy Baumeister who is a major figure in psychology Karen Dale and Kristen Somer. It's titled Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology reaction formation projection displacement undoing isolation sublimation and denial and again I'll read to you the abstract recent studies in social psychology are reviewed for evidence relevant to seven Freudian defense mechanisms. This work emphasizes normal populations moderate rather than extreme forms of defense and protection of self-esteem against threat reaction formation isolation and denial have been amply shown in studies and they do seem to serve defensive functions undoing in the sense of counterfactual thinking is also well documented but does not serve to defend against the threat projection is evident but the projection itself may be a byproduct of defense rather than part of the defensive response itself displacement is not well supported in any meaningful sense although emotions and physical arousal states do carry over from one situation to the next no evidence of sublimation was found reaction formation tends to increase dramatically in polarized societies societies or conflict is the organizing principle for example american society society in the united states today is an anomic polarized society and reaction formation is bound to explode as a preferred defense mechanism we are already seeing this everything from mass shootings to white supremacy militancy is a form these are forms of reaction formation psychologists politicians decision makers or policymakers educators would do well to pay very close attention to this much neglected defense mechanism because ladies and gentlemen it is upon us


endowment. It is a special pleasure for me to welcome home to the Carnegie Endowment. My friend and colleague, Mike McFaul, for the launch of his truly extraordinary new book from Cold War to Hot Peace. Mike and I actually first met on the basketball court at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow almost 25 years ago. He was a lot better than I was, just so you know. He's a little taller. That's part of it. Yeah, it don't really take you so far. You can't jump either. But that was at a time when I was the political counselor in Moscow at our embassy and Mike was a fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. That was also a time when we both had jump shots. And neither of us had any delusions at that time of ever serving as the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow. Well today our jump shots are long gone. But both of us, we'll find out. But both of us had the honor of serving as the American Ambassador in Moscow and helping to manage what remains an extraordinarily complicated relationship. Mike was a wonderful colleague in the Obama administration, first at the National Security Council staff and then at the embassy in Moscow. We worked together to try to realize the momentary promise of the reset and then to deal and struggle together with the relapse that followed that. Mike was through it all thoughtful and eloquent and full of insight and energy. Exactly the qualities that I think shine through so brightly in his new book. From Cold War to Hot Peace is truly a joy to read. So I urge all of you after our discussion to go by as many copies as you can carry. They're at a discount to actually outside this room. And Mother's Day's on Sunday. Christmas is not too far away. But and I'll abuse the prerogative of host to begin our discussion with a few questions and then open it up to all of you. But before I do that, I just ask all of you to join me in a warm welcome for Mike McFaul. Thank you. Mike, congratulations again. It's really... Well thank you. And Bill, if I could just say before we start, first of all, thanks for hosting me. I spent three fantastic years working in this building and a year and a half out in Moscow for the Moscow Carnegie Center. So it's great to be back here. But it's really great that I can do this with you because many of these chapters we shared together. And the good times and the bad times, but you were just a fantastic partner with me, mentor to me. I learned a lot from working with you. And I just really... When you get out of government, there's some things you want to remember, some things you want to forget. But one of the great things is you get to work with just incredible people like you. So this is our shared history. You get to write your own.  But I consider that some of what we did here are shared project together. Well, that's very kind of you. And congratulations again on a terrific book. I thought maybe we'd start by taking a step back, you know, both as a student and then as a scholar in the latter part of the Soviet Union's history. And after the end of the Cold War, you know, you had a lot of formative experiences, both living and in and writing about the Soviet Union and Russia. So maybe talk a little bit about how those early experiences shaped your view of Russia and US-Russian relations. Yeah, well, let's start from the very beginning then. So, you know, I grew up in Montana. I'd never been abroad before. You'll appreciate this. Maybe not everybody was. But the junior year of my high school, I joined the debate team. And the issue was how to improve US trade policy. And we ran a case, my partner and I, that we should repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the 1974 Trade Act. Way back then, 30 years later, we eventually did that, although not exactly the way we were talking about it in 1979. My debate partner, by the way, back then, he's now Senator Danes from Montana. So we were a pretty good team. But I tell you that because it was during that period I got interested in the Soviet Union and I showed up at Stanford, fall quarter of my freshman year, 17-year-old kid. I took first year Russian and how nations deal with each other. Poli-Sci 35, if there's any Stanford folks out there from Steve Krasner. And back then, I had a theory that there was a lot of misunderstanding and misperception between the Soviets and Americans, kind of, you know, what I would know as a kid from Montana. And I had this desire that if I wanted to learn who these people were, I didn't believe the imagery that I'd send. And that's how I ended up going on my first trip abroad to Leningrad in the summer of 1983. Imagine what my mother said about that, by the way. She thought California was a communist state.   Don't forget, that's what our president was calling that place at the time. And that first experience, I did believe that engagement, learning about people, could reduce misunderstandings. I went back in the winter of 1985. My Russian was a little better. It was the winter. I met more dissidents. I met refuseniks. I got more into the fabric of society. And that's when I developed a different piece of the way I've thought about Russia and international relations ever since, which was, while this regime, this communist regime is in place, we're only going to be able to go so far in our cooperation. And that's when I begin to think about those issues in a way I did not back in 1983. And that's why those early periods that you just talked about, you know, started by Mikhail Gorbachev, a hero of mine. And I had the privilege of seeing him pretty often when I was ambassador to this day. And another hero of mine who I still work with, George Schultz. Obviously, President Reagan is no longer with us, but George I still see often. And those were, those were really exciting times to me because there were Russians that wanted to build democratic institutions and markets and come closer to the West. And even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is true as well. And when I went back there as that now, working for a time for an NGO, the National Democratic Institute, those organizations now, and I was just debating about this last night up in New York, it's described as meddling and interference. And you guys were there to overthrow things. And I just want to remind people here, and I see some people that were part of that time. Horton, I see you way in the back. You were part of that, baby. We weren't there meddling. We were there invited by the Russian government. We were there in cooperation with Russians. And, you know, that was a very romantic period for me. Then we made mistakes. Russians made more mistakes, by the way. We always think about us as having all this power. Well, they made a lot of mistakes during that period, too. But that's the form, that formative time did help me to develop the kind of theories and analytic framework I have about the nature of diplomacy to this day. It leads to sort of a macro question, which is, you know, all of us remember in the fifties, there was, you know, the great debate in the U.S. about who lost China. And you see a little bit as people look at the arc of the history of U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War, since the period you were just describing. There echoes of that in the debate that opens up from time to time about who lost Russia. So what's your reaction to that question? Or is it even the right question to ask? No, I think it's the right question. I just spent an hour and a half debating Stephen Cohen last night. And you can imagine who was on what side of that debate. He's undecided. He's got some strong views, but he probably thinks I have some strong views, too. Well, I mean, that, in a way, that's what the book was about.  And I also wanted to answer within it the story of the Obama administration, because the Obama administration, we have critics on all sides. One side says we were too weak and we created the permissive conditions for Putin to invade Crimea. And another side says we were too tough on them. And we talked about too many democracy and human rights. And so I wanted to detail having looked at that debate about us, our time in government. And there are some good pieces out there, but I just decided nobody's going to tell my story if I don't tell it myself. And so that was really the reason to write the book. To the bigger question, though, of which the Obama administration was just a piece of, I'd say a couple of things. And these are all arguments in more detail on the book. The first piece is I do think we underestimated the challenge of what I call the triple transformation from empire to nation state, from a command economy to a market economy, and from autocracy to democracy. That was the agenda of the newly born independent Russian state after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We were distracted. We had an election. One of those candidates said it's the economy stupid, if you remember that. And we were not paying attention. And that fateful year of 1992, and again, I see lots of people in this room, many of whom know that history better than I do. But I think we thought we'd won, right? It was the end of history to quote my colleague Frank Fukuyama, our side had won the Cold War. And so that we didn't see the need to embrace those that also thought they had won the Cold War, by the way, Russians who thought that they had fought for these things in a common struggle with us. Now, we debated them in these rooms. I was a part of them about, well, had we done more? Had all been wasted? But I have a different view. I think had we been more engaged then, so that's on our side of the ledger of a missed opportunity. Then you go through some of the foreign policy crisis, which I do go through in the book, NATO expansion, bombing of Serbia, the Iraq war, color revolutions in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine 2004, and of course, some things that the Russians did, crony capitalism, August 1998, two Chechen wars, and invading Georgia in 2008. And that's a pretty complicated history that you personally lived through. I watched that history. You lived through it and were a participant. And I want to be clear, those were moments of confrontation in the relationship. They were difficult issues. Boris Yeltsin was not a fan of NATO expansion either. But after all of that drama, when the Obama administration began and the idea of the reset was born, per zagruska, we had a concept, the president had a concept that we wanted to reset relations and find win-win outcomes to put behind. He was always very dismissive, like, why do we have to talk about all this stuff in the past? I'm the new president. Change we believe in. Do you remember that? It wasn't just change in America, it was change in foreign policy. And for a time, we did that, as you well know. I mean, we negotiated the start treaty. We opened up the supply route, the Northern Distribution Network to Afghanistan, vital to our national security in terms of what we planned to do eventually in 2011 in Pakistan. We got Russia into the WTO. We got comprehensive sanctions against Iran, which I think was the predicate for what I think was a fantastic agreement that my colleague here helped to negotiate and tragic that it has been walked away from by our president. Trade was up. Visa regime was up. It's all in my book, you know, go through that list. And importantly, even the governments were cooperating and you and I were in those meetings, Bill. This was real. This was not just, it was real genuine interest to cooperate. And there was, you know, cooperating about big things. We're talking about Iran, Afghanistan, nuclear weapons. This is not like let's hold hands and sing kumbaya and have a good relationship. These were things that were vital, I think, to America's national security. And of course, Medvedev and Putin would have never signed up to them if they didn't think that it was in their national interest. This notion of concessions, right? Where there's no, nobody does any concessions in diplomacy. And I feel silly saying that sitting next to Ambassador Burns, given his what he knows about diplomacy and what I don't. But it was real. And by the way, at the peak of that time, 60% of Russians had a positive view of the United States. 60% of Americans had a positive view of Russia. That was just a few years ago. That wasn't ancient history. That was five years ago. So I tell you all that, and maybe we'll get into Putin in a minute, because all of that happened after NATO expansion, after the war in Iraq, after the Orange Revolution. So if I can put my political scientist hat on for a minute and take my government hat off, you can't look at those independent variables as your explanation for the conflict today without accounting for the cooperation that I just talked about. And you tell me, Bill, because you were there as well. I don't recall a single major discussion with either Medvedeva or Putin about NATO expansion in those periods. It comes up later. But at that time, it was on the periphery of what we were doing, partly because of what happened in Georgia, and partly because after Yanukovych was elected, it wasn't a drama in Ukraine.  They contributed to it, but there were other causes. And those come later, and that has to do with Putin. And to be shorter on this, what I would say, in fact, I remember it very vividly. And I write about this episode in the book, because you were there, too. We went out to see Putin in July 2009. We had that fabulous breakfast with all those eggs and things. And Putin came ready for that meeting. He had a big brief. He needed to educate the new guy about all the things we had done wrong. All the things the Bush administration had done wrong. And he spoke for like an hour, Bill, like nonstop. And I remember vividly for two reasons. One, I was new to this note-taking business. And I was a note-taker. And my handwriting's horrible.  I'm writing furiously. And number two, the meeting was scheduled for an hour. And I was the SAO, the senior administration official who was supposed to read it out. And I was worried my guy hadn't said anything. It's minute 57. What are we going to read out? But then it got- Well, I remember it was our bright collective suggestion, I think, to the president to be a really good idea to start the conversation by asking him a question about what's gone wrong in the US-Russia relations. I think that was your idea, not mine. An hour later, we wondered if our own diplomatic careers had just come to a sudden end. But anyway, That is exactly right. I do remember that. But it was actually the right question, because he had to get all that stuff off his chest. He gave us the condensed version of it now. But for me, there was one moment in particular that was important. It's when we talked about Iraq. And he said, we made a mistake in Iraq. And President Obama agreed with him. And he said, maybe you don't know, but I was against that war long before it was popular to be against that war. And that was a little surprising to Putin, right? Because we were the Americans, and suddenly this American was making a different argument. And I tell you that story because then, you know, Obama said, we're not in the regime change. We don't do that. I have a different strategy for diplomacy in the world. And, you know, over time, the rest of the world got to see that. Fast forward to what in many ways may have been the peak of cooperation. It's a trip I took with a vice president. You are on that trip, too. And remember, we went into the, the Kremlin, and they told us right as we're walking in, sorry to tell these stories, but I'm sitting here with Bill. So read the book for all the big stuff. But I want this because you can now help me remember that, too. We're walking in and the protocol person says they're just going to do a one-on-one. And that was not how we had planned it. And Tony Blinken, who is with us, he said, Mike, go into that room no matter what. We have to have somebody take notes, right? And so that we know what's going on. And criminal security always has such a sense of humor about these things. Yeah, well, I had another time where we're going in to see Putin with Secretary Clinton and you were there, too. And we're walking in and right as we're walking in, they grabbed my elbow and pulled me back and said, Mr, you know, Dr. McFall, you're going to be sitting here, not in the room. So yeah, that was a surprise to me as well. But I remember it because then I did what Tony told me to and I had to push my way in and there was just the two chairs there. So I sat far away, kind of where Ambassador Collins is sitting right now. I was that far away. And like two minutes later, Sergei Prohodko slips in to create cemetery again. And that's when Medvedev said you guys are right about the Arab Spring. These play these governments have been there too long. And that's when he made clear that he was going to abstain on the resolution for the use of force in Libya. And then we were surprised by that. And I would, you know, think about that never in Soviet or Russian history had they gone along with the Security Council resolution like that. Well, guess what? There was one guy that thought that was a big mistake, the Prime Minister. And I think that that was the beginning, whether there was a future for Medvedev, that's hard to know. He most certainly thought there was. But that year 2011 was I think a fateful turning point in terms of sorry for the long answer to be lost. But that was the Arab Spring, right? And in all of those dramas, which were people mobilizing against regimes punctuated by December 2011 in Russia, people were mobilizing against those regimes. We were not orchestrating it. Unless there's some secret thing that I never saw, I was at the White House at the time, we were reacting to it, just like everybody else. And by the way, some of our colleagues didn't want to be reacting to it, right? This was distracting us from other things we were trying to do. But that's not the way Putin saw it. Putin saw us as being behind this stuff. And then when we got to 2011, he also saw us as being behind that mobilization against us. And people forget this, but he was not doing so well back then. That's when he was the lowest he'd ever been in public opinions. He was nervous about that.  And so that's when he pivoted in this way to marginalize opposition inside, mobilize his base, and we became the, you know, the enemy again. And I think that fundamental debate about regime change and who's responsible at the essence, that was, I think, what ended the recent. How big a problem, we talked a little bit about the Putin factor, but how big a problem do you think the structural challenge of engaging with Putin during that period, during, you know, the period when Medvedev was president and Putin was prime minister. How big a factor was that, do you think? Because other than the president's one visit to Moscow, kind of episodic conversations on G20, Secretary of State going, Vice President going, but you didn't have that kind of conversation. How big a factor do you think that was? I think it was, I think it was an important factor, maybe not big, but I mean, you know, we tried to create schemes to try to have more FaceTime with Putin. And one of them I write in the book. And by the way, I got my book cleared. In fact, I got it cleared twice, because I wanted to be careful about not bleeding into saying things I shouldn't. And a lot of it had to get cut out. So for future historians, this is just a first cut. There's a lot of things that I would like to written about that we'll have to wait for later. But I did get permission to write about one of them.  So let's be clear. You understood this because you knew Putin, you had worked with him before in a way that I hadn't. I'd known him and met him back in 1991, but I hadn't worked with him like you. And one of our colleagues, Ushakov, kept telling us that like, you know, you need FaceTime in order to have a relationship with him. And just two episodes from the book. So it's awkward because you can only have one president at the time. Putin doesn't come to the G20 meetings. Medvedev does. He doesn't come to APEC. Medvedev does. UN General Assembly. Medvedev comes. Putin doesn't come. So we schemed a little bit about trying to have that that connectivity. And one thing that Putin's an expert on that Medvedev is not, is the Olympics. And so my idea in 2009, I hope you don't remember, but we had a bid for the Olympics back then, the Chicago, and we were so stupid about these things that we sent the president in a big entourage, I think the Copenhagen to lobby for it. And we came in fourth place. That was not a good, that was not a good, that was not good intel, you know, on the White House. But because of that excuse, Putin does know the Olympic Committee pretty well. Let's leave it at that for now. And so my idea, let's get Obama on the phone with Putin to talk about the Olympics, because then we have an excuse. And then we'll segue to Iran. That was the idea. And not everybody thought it was a good idea. This is in the White House, right? But the president thought, what the hell, let's make a go of it. And so they get on the phone. And by the way, Putin is thrilled to talk about this stuff. You know, he really does know that. And at the end of the conversation, he said, of course, you know, you have no chance.  And it's like, why are we having this conversation? And then the president gently said to say, by the way, you know, on Iran, we think we're going to have to pivot to pressure, right? That was the period we're in. And, and he started to articulate our arguments about it. And he said, you know, Mr. President, in our constitution, the president is in charge of foreign policy. The prime minister is not. But it just so happens that I'm having lunch. It's like five o'clock in the afternoon in Moscow. I'm having lunch with the president right now. Yeah, let me hand over the phone to President Medvedeva. And Medvedeva got on the phone and that we all were laughing, you know, the president's holding the phone like this. It's like, okay, we got our signal. Nice try. But we're not going to do it. You know, the second one was more curious. And I'm actually interested in your view on this. But you'll remember it. Putin had been reelected. He was waiting for inauguration. And we yet again, wanted to reach out and engage. And that was our strategy, right? We believe that that was important for what we were trying to achieve. And we had this idea to send Tom Donilon, the national security advisor at the time, to Moscow. And to present a letter to Putin. By the way, carrying letters as a diplomat. I write about this. This is something I thought was really bizarre. When I first joined the government, February 2009, you know, we at the White House worked on a letter with input from other people. And, you know, it was Bill's idea that we should write this letter. And we did. It was a pretty conceptual letter, as you recall. And then he had this idea, we need to go deliver it. And I'm like, what is this? Like, we can't use email. And Bill and I, that was our first trip together. I'm just romantically remembering. We still had quill pens in the State Department. It came naturally. But it was absolutely right because it got us, it gave us a chance to speak to all kinds of people. So we were replant, we were running that play again. Donilon, Tom was bringing a letter from President Putin, from President Obama to President-elect Putin. And we went out to see him, you know, just the two of us. Actually, that was a pretty tough meeting for me because he went after me about something Putin did personally. And I write about that in the book. But the main thing was to say, we have a, here's our agenda. And you know how Tom is. Tom is very prepared. He pushed the government so that we had a real laydown of our strategy. And he rolled it out admirably. But the real reason of it was to give the letter and to invite President Putin to the White House. By the way, not everybody at the White House thought this was a good idea. Having this guy that had just, you know, stolen an election and, you know, the more political side of the house is like, we really want to have Putin come right after it. And it's on my mind because that's kind of a debate that your city is having about President Trump right now and, you know, meeting with President Putin. But we made that decision and he was going to be on his way to the G8 or so we thought. And so we were going to have a big meeting and stay at Blair House with all the bells and whistles. And Putin, who was very strange, he was like, you know, I actually can't come. What do you mean you can't come? He said, well, I'm really busy putting together my government. Like you're not the Prime Minister anymore.  It was very bizarre. It was and, you know, I talk about it in the book and we speculate as we did as a government. But he didn't come. And he didn't attend the G8. He sent Medvedev, his Prime Minister, to attend that. And I just tell that story in detail. One, to give you a flavor of what's in the book to make you interested, because it's not just about grand theory and history. There are those episodes. But two, that when we're criticized for as we are that we never tried to reach out to Putin, you know, I have a somewhat different view. I don't want to monopolize the conversation. So let's open it up to everybody here. All I'd ask is raise your hand. You have a question, wait for the microphone to come to you. You'd introduce yourself. Yeah, please. And then try to be concise. In the back there, please. Hi, my name is Mohamed Bochawala. I'm an FSO, actually, who will be going out to MSC Moscow in about two weeks as an officer. Thank you for your service. Good luck. Thank you. My question is, I mean, to both of you, what areas of cooperation do you think are available between Russia and the US in the next few years, given the state of relationship right now? No, good to us both. That's not in my book. It'll be concise, but no. Yeah, I mean, I'm not optimistic about a grand agenda. You know, I think one of the titles of my book and no more resets for now. And I say that in part because a lot of things have happened, you know, between 2009 and where we're at now that are not going to be easy just to say, well, let's just forget about that. Let's just move on. I don't think that's possible. And at the same time, I firmly believe that we should engage with the Russian government, including at the highest levels and including it, you know, you should. So I'm glad you're going out because there are two things that we need to do as you need to do. And I used to do as a diplomat. You need to engage at a minimum so that you're not having, I said this earlier, disagreements based on misperception and bad information. And I fear in U.S. Russian relations right now where there's so little connectivity that that's dangerous. I mean, another thing that Bill and I did together, we created something called the Bilateral Presidential Commission back in 2009. And the whole idea of that was just to create more connections from all kinds of people throughout the government. Some of them didn't want to do it. And we set up working groups to make them do it. So at a minimum, you reduce that, right? And then you can confront Putin, contain him in certain areas and cooperate when it's in our national interest. You know, we did that in the Cold War. And I think we should do it again. And the book you should read, if you got a little more reading time. So first, you need to read mine, or at least buy mine and buy it for all of your new colleagues out there in Moscow, because it's not going to be available in Moscow anytime soon. That's a true story. It's too controversial. So it'll probably be published in Ukraine and Russian before it's published in Moscow. But the other book you need to get is you need to get George Schultz's memoir. I used to carry that big book. It's a big book with me throughout my time in government, because he talks about this, that even during the height of the Cold War, it was folly not to engage with the Soviets. And people forget this about the Cold War. You don't. But a lot of people do. He came in later, right? He didn't start with President Reagan in January. He came in in the summer of 82. And he recalls in him his memoirs where there was this, we're not going to talk to those guys, particularly over at the NSC. They're the evil ones. And he said, no, that's crazy. We have some things we have to do. Doesn't mean we have to call them our friend, right? And we're not going to check our values at the door just because we're meeting with them. And Secretary Schultz was always good about, okay, we're going to talk about nuclear weapons in the morning session. And in the afternoon, we're going to talk about human rights. And those are both on the agenda. And I think that's like the kind of proper strategy for today. And at the top of my list is arms control. Regrettably, it has to be. The START treaty is expiring. Thankfully, we're not in a quantitative arms race like we were during the Cold War. But I do believe we're in a qualitative arms race right now, both on the offensive side and on the defensive side. And we've gotten out of the habit of talking about arms control. It died out in the latter years of the Obama administration. The Trump administration doesn't seem that interested in it. And you know better than I do, but the National Security Advisor doesn't seem to be a big fan of it. But I think that's a big mistake. I think it's a big mistake. I think we need to get engaged in that that place. Because if the START treaty expires without something to replace it, I think that's very destabilizing for US Russian relations. And I just think the only thing I'd add is I think you see the whole architecture of arms control that so many of you worked so hard on over decades, crumbling now, it's not just, you know, the absence of a successor to New START, but the INF treaty has fallen apart. So you're trying to manage, you know, a truly significant major power relationship right now without guardrails. And that's the challenge. So, you know, I wish you luck. I envy you in a way going out to Moscow again. But I think there's a lot of really important diplomatic work to be done, just as Mike said, in trying to recreate some of those guardrails, even if you can't have huge expectations about partnership right now. Please. Andy Kutchins, Georgetown University. Good to see you, Andy. Hey, it's great to be here being seeing the two of you on this stage and being at the Carnegie Endowment. We worked together as colleagues for years. It's wonderful. And Mike, I've already bought two copies of the book. I ordered one on Amazon.com, hoping it would arrive this morning. So I would bring it here for you to sign. But it didn't. So I bought another one for you to specially sign it. I'm not sure this is going to quite do it for me. We'll take care of that. I unfortunately have a hard deadline. I have to get out of here. I'm presenting a book to our former boss, President Obama. So I can't be late for that. Okay, but I'll sign a few before I have to do that. So the question goes back to the to Crimea that that very faithful time. We've talked a little bit about this privately. You know, when the February 21st agreement was signed by the European Foreign Ministers and the Yanukovych and the opposition figures that were there. And President Obama called Mr. Putin afterwards and saying that they both expressed their support about this agreement, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But you know, a few few hours later, it kind of collapsed with Yanukovych disappearing. Yeah. And to me, there was not a conversation, as I understand it, from Tim Colton and Sam Sharpe's book between the President Obama and President Putin until March 1st. And I felt like, wow, maybe if there was any you think that President Obama should have tried a little harder with a reassurance call, like once things collapsed. And I know you were, you know, you were not there. Just look, you know, we really did support this agreement. You think there was there much thought about that? You know, Andy, it's a great question and it's a great question to ask both of us because we were in different places. But on that day, we were actually together in Sochi February 21st. I remember it well. And I'm going to tell my way of remembering it. And then I want to hear Bill's way of remembering it. And I want to remind people when you look at my book. I'm very explicit in my book that this is my memories, informed memories. I've looked at my files and stuff and I had cooperation with the government. But as somebody who's also written books and interviewed people, you know, I've written lots of books where I've done that. Memories are flawed. And this is just a first cut at history. And I want to encourage people to think of it that way. And when you read the book, please think of it in those terms. And I just decided I wanted to get my story down and then others get to kibbutz with it. So this is a really unique opportunity. You're talking about a very specific moment in time that the two of us were there. So a couple of things. And then I want to hear what Bill thinks as well. So we did. We were trying to get that agreement to hold. You know, the vice president was the point person on that, you know, negotiating with both sides. And I do remember it feeling like it was a breakthrough that they had signed it. I also remember and just to recall that there were Ukrainian opposition leaders that didn't support it. And those three people that signed it, the street was saying, who who elected them to speak for us? I actually just was in Ukraine 10, 10 or 12 days ago. And one of those people I wanted to kind of triangulate about this very issue, his name is Mustafa Naim. And Mustafa was the guy that originally went on Facebook and said, you know, he's the one that sparked the whole my dawn. And he reminded me that there was a lot of tension among them and the three leaders about whether that was the right thing to do. And don't forget, you know, 112 or people, many people had just been killed. And for them to be negotiating, that was tough on their side. But your right, at least to the best of my knowledge, I want to add that phrase three or four more times, that what, you know, Yana Kovic left, right? The deal was signed. He has his story, his formal story for why he did. I remember being surprised by it. Like, why is he leaving? He just signed it. He says he can't be secure in his own country. Well, why didn't he go to the Donbass? Like he could have been secure there. You know, he would have been just fine somewhere there. And yet he shows up and rust off. And to this day, I am not Sam Sherriff and Timothy Colton, Professor Colton, have written, I think, a terrific book on it. But I think there's a lot more that we do not understand, particularly about what Putin was saying to Yana Kovic and the game that they were playing, because you don't go to rust off without Putin signing off on that move, right?  And I remember you and I, we weren't so celebratory at the time because we both thought Putin was going to strike back. I remember sitting in my hotel room in Sochi listening to this surreal interview that Yana Kovic was giving in Saratov thinking there's this is strange. There's there's there's more episodes coming. And and Bill had the idea we actually were in the same city with Putin at the time, and we tried to get you a meeting with him. And he didn't, you know, no disrespect, Ambassador Burns, but he didn't want to take that meeting because, you know, we wanted and Bill in particular, were concerned exactly about the things you were saying. Now, why the phone call took as long as it did. I mean, the first phone call was important. Why it took as long as it did. I'm interested in what Bill had to say about that because that was after my time. Well, ironically, I mean, because I was sitting in Sochi then and then I went to Kiev two days after that. And so that's right. I forgot about that for a while. Yeah. No, but I remember that episode much as you just described it. So I think Putin, you know, Putin was preoccupied with the Sochi Winter Olympics, which was his baby. And I think he was he always in my experience had a very dim, dim view of Yanukovic anyway. He thought he was a weakling. Yes. And so I think he was in some ways surprised when Yanukovic fled the political battlefield as quickly as he did. Yeah. You know, often in my experience gets a lot of credit for sort of grand strategy and thinking things through. And you know, there were contingency plans in the Kremlin, I'm sure, which were demonstrated in the annexation of Crimea that followed. But I think he was making up a lot of this stuff as he went along in that period. But the one thing to remember us talking about at the time I was certain of was he was going to respond and respond emphatically, because this was from his point of view as big a challenge as he was going to face. Anyway, sorry. Don't be sorry. Keep talking. Yes, please. In the back. John Evans, former colleague of yours. I just see him on Twitter. So it's nice to see you in person. Nice to have you here, Mike. Twice now yesterday in your debate with Steve Cohen and again today, you dipped into, you said you put on your political science hat and noted that several of the elements that have been used to explain perhaps the how we lost Russia, NATO expansion, the attack on Serbia. And I think there may have been a couple of others Iraq war Iraq war that those can't be used to explain this because they precede the cooperation that you so nicely have talked about today. That's I understand the the sort of political science point here, but isn't it the case that first of all, grievances can can mount up without actually occupying the center of diplomatic discourse. And secondly, in the minds of many Russians, at least, NATO's purpose changed. First of all, we went out of area. We went out of area as far as Afghanistan. Right. And then there was the moment of the Bucharest summit, when we started talking seriously about Ukraine and Georgia. And I would note that the new Assistant Secretary last week was again stressing that Ukraine will be in NATO, which is still on the books. So isn't that that political science catch? Isn't that a little bit facile? Definitely not facile. That's a wrong word. Don't insult my entire profession. But thanks for asking the question, because it's a good question. And the latent part is a is a very good point. Right.  You can't you can't say this was caused by NATO expansion when in the middle of it, we're not confronting each other. So how can, you know, in the in the height of cooperation, nobody was saying that NATO expansion caused this bilateral relationship to go on this way. So that's to me logical. You can't just say and I would say the same about a lot of appropriation of history that political leaders deliberately appropriate to say, oh, this conflict we're having now, it really starts in 1372, right, or wherever they go back to after 400 years of peace. And now we're going to go back then. And that's the cause. And you know, that's what politicians do. But to me, you have to have a more proximate cause. And then the other way that I that we deal with it as a discipline is use counterfactuals. What if there hadn't been a Maidan movement? What if there hadn't been protests on the streets of Moscow in December 2011? And that reaction to it, would the relationship been different? My answer to that is yes. Those are the things that they cause that that that tension. And so that's just the way I think of it as a social scientist. But I think of it that way as a person to because I was there for all of that, right? I was there for all those meetings. And I kid you not in the phone calls I was on. And I was on almost all of them. Nobody was complaining about NATO expansion in 2009, 2010, 2011. Our critics, maybe they're not in the room here, you know, where's Bob Kagan? Our critics would say, well, yeah, that's right, because you guys were you should have been pushing for NATO expansion. But you weren't, right? But but by the time we got there for better, and I say we and now I realize, of course, Ambassador Burns was there before me and after me. So maybe he should explain it, because he had much more insight about Georgia in particular. But by the time we showed up and we did our interagency review of our policy. And we did, you know, I thought we did a pretty good job, by the way, because I got to go back and look at those papers. Whether you agree or not, we had an interagency process that produced a policy. And that's a good thing, by the way, if anybody from the Trump administration is watching, I highly recommend it as a way to make decisions. But NATO expansion was a non issue. It literally was not an issue because wasn't an issue in Georgia, the NATO Alliance was not seeking to bring the Georgians in. And same thing with Ukraine. So it only becomes an issue again after those things that I just described. And there, John, I think we agree. So it creates the material, if you will, these grievances that then can be pulled out to say that this is really important. And Vladimir Putin is not the only politician in the world that does that. So I like that. The latent is it's in the background. It's kind of suppressed. And then something else happens and then it it comes out. I think if I could rewrite in my second edition, I'm going to use that language. So thank you for the question. That's I'm sorry, we just have time for maybe two real quick questions. Way in the back, please. Hi, my name is Scott Rolland. I'm an episode as well, former consul general in the Katrinberg. Great. And I wanted to ask both of you to weigh in on this one if I could and go back and look at a decision that was made in 2017. I think a particularly painful decision for the U.S. Embassy and our consulates. And that was the demand that we draw down our staff in Moscow and at all the consulates. So I would love to hear your assessment of how we responded and had you been in a position of power. What might you have suggested to help us respond to that in a way that wouldn't have caused so much pain, especially to all these wonderful local Russian employees that worked in all those places? Well, I'm going to ask I'm going to answer in the historic way. And then I'm going to ask Ambassador Burns to talk about 2017. You left out the maybe you did it on purpose, the demand. You put it in the passive tense. It was Putin demanded. OK, let's be clear about it. It wasn't it wasn't some kind of abstract thing. Putin said, you're going to do this. Now, and I remember and I write about it in our book, our book. Notice I just said that, Bill. My book. Bill's is coming out next year. We face this with the demand that we close down USID when I was ambassador in 2012 and 2013, the negotiations over that. And what I would say is we tried to push back. We tried to fight that. And we, you know, I think we we did the right things. At the end of the day, though, if Putin says that, it's very difficult to to carry on, if you will, at the barricades. And just to be clear, I think it's horrible that that happened. I don't think that serves Russia's interest as I wrote about at the time. I don't think it serves America's interest. One of the things I was very proud about and I write about in the book. One, we got a new visa regime in place that we negotiated three year multiple entry visas. Yet some people have been able to take advantage of. I have not because I'm on the sanctions list, but I look forward some day to be able to get one of those visas. But we also this is we it was very important to me. When I was, you know, the new guy, I wanted to reduce the time it took to get a visa. And we by the end of my time as ambassador, we got it down to below 30 days. We fought hard. We fought mostly hard with Washington, by the way, over that. That was not us in Moscow. Really important to me. Somebody just emailed me the other day. So don't quote me. I'm quoting them. The average wait time now for a visa is 244 days. That's the direct result of that. And that's the Russian way to get an American visa, right? So to me, Putin was shooting himself in the foot and doing that. But Bill, if you have a thought on it. Well, rather than do that, let me ask one last question. That's all we have time for. OK, sir. Thank you. I'm Tom Bradley from George Mason University. Closely related to your answer to Mr. Evans, what should NATO do in the future to ensure alliance cohesion concerning expansion, mission change, reorientation, restructuring? Thank you. Strength of NATO. I mean, I would say stay the course. Tragically, I say that, right? I want to be clear. Like this is a book of tragedy. This is a book of opportunities missed. But having said that, at this point, the best way to decrease the probability of conflict with Russia is to make crystal clear what we'll do if a NATO ally is somehow attacked. And I think that is a way for peace, not a way for confrontation. I philosophically have a different view about NATO. I think of NATO as like me putting up an alarm system in my house. As long as you're not planning to break into my house, that doesn't threaten you. I know that the Russians don't think that way. And remind people when they say, well, they put these weapons right up on their borders, spend some time in Tallinn and look at where the Russian weapons are on their borders. And Russia, again, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the force they have, the conventional force they have amassed in Europe today, is very impressive. And people forget about that. That has been happening during this whole period. But for me, stay the course and reduce the probabilities of a conflict happening. I don't, I'm not as worried about this as a lot of people. Putin has faults and I disagree with them and I go into them in detail.  And I don't think he is looking for a fight with NATO. But the way to make sure that he reduces the probability, reduces uncertainty. Uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to those commitments is to make sure that we are credibly commit to what we signed up for and being part of NATO. I hate to bring this discussion to a close, but I wanna thank all of you for coming especially to thank Mike not only for a terrific conversation today, but for a terrific book. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.