Eddie Fishman
speaker
753 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jun
Eddie Fishman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I remember at the State Department, a lot of my colleagues were like very against sanctioning Russia.
And I think it was because they had just got Russia into the World Trade Organization like 18 months before.
And many of them, like career diplomats, had spent like a decade of their lives on the ground in Russia, like working with them to like make sure that their laws were right and, you know, getting in place so they could join the World Trade Organization.
And then like 18 months after, like the big project of their careers had culminated, we're like, actually, we're sanctioning Russia.
And so there was a lot of like blood, sweat and tears poured out by US diplomats to try to bring Russia into the fold.
But yeah, I mean, I think unfortunately, history just didn't go our way.
Look, I think each individual has their own perspective, their own moral compass.
I think it's interesting because for me, I think I would have a lot of trouble serving in an administration whose policies I disagreed with.
And frankly, just to be totally candid, I was a career diplomat at the State Department.
I could have theoretically stayed and worked through
the first Trump administration.
And I decided not to in large part because I really did believe that what Russia was doing in Ukraine was morally objectionable, morally abhorrent.
They were literally conquering their neighboring territory or neighboring country.
which is not something that I think many of us ever expected to see again in our lifetime.
Something like that had not happened since World War II, an actual military conquest occurring on European soil.
And then you had Trump elected in 2016,
with the Russian government actively assisting.
I'm not saying that Trump was colluding, but certainly the Russian government did put its thumb on the scale.
And then you had, I think, in the beginning of the first Trump administration, a real effort to say, well, maybe we should just excuse all of Russia's sins.
We should let them have Ukraine.
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