Francis Foster

Something different how?

Like what should we have tried?

But that requires admission of defeat, which is the thing you've just said we shouldn't have done.

You said we should have been, you know, right?

Yeah.

What happened in Russia, you're right, is we didn't defeat communism as the ideology.

We didn't say, you went through this terrible period of communism, all of these terrible communist leaders, they were bad, whatever.

But a lot of people in Russia don't think communism was a great period in Russian history.

But my point is, in order to have gone through that, Russia would have felt even more humiliated, or some Russians would have felt even more humiliated than they ended up doing.

And the thing that many Russians feel humiliated by is not that the evil American economists came and ruined everything.

It's actually the fact, I remember this as a kid in Russia, being given humanitarian aid.

And the view is, well, you know, these people, they gave us these crumbs off their table.

How insulting.

We will build ourselves up again and we will be strong and we will show them.

What should we have done then?

I don't think that's, with all respect, a very strong argument when we're talking about the thing that we're talking about.

Because if you say, we should have done something else, I don't know what.

Well, I agree with your point about respecting different cultures and their many achievements.

The reason I'm not picking on you specifically, I have heard this argument a lot about how the reason we've ended up in conflict with Russia is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West mistreated Russia.

And I'm sure you can find plenty of individual examples of where that's absolutely the case.