Fiona Hill

But he might fight now for his country, Ukraine.

No, and again, it wouldn't have been obvious for the Soviet Union.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

It's that whole counterfactual, right?

Yeah.

Because, I mean, if you've kind of, that's why we all need in the United States to really examine our own history.

Because, you know, there's a lot of lessons from that.

that we should treat very cautiously.

It doesn't mean that history repeats or even rhymes, you know, the old axiom all the time, but there are a lot of things that you can take away differently from putting a different perspective and a different slant on the same set of events.

I mean, I always used to wonder, like, how many books can be written on the French Revolution?

or even on the Russian Revolution.

You know, I studied with Richard Pipes.

I remember he was really offended after he'd written his great Microsopus on the Russian Revolution, two volumes, that other people would, you know, kind of write about the Russian Revolution.

He said, I've written it all.

And I thought, well, actually, maybe you haven't.

It's like there might be some completely different angle there that you haven't really thought of.

And that's Putin.

You know, I remember Peskov saying,

Putin reads history all the time, Russian history, and I thought, well, maybe he should read some world history.

You know, maybe he should, you know, kind of read some European authors on Russian history, not just, you know, reading Lamanosa for, you know, Russian historians on Russian history, because you might see something from a very different perspective.