Steven Bartlett

We missed the significance of China.

And we missed a lot of those things because we were so sure that we were just winning.

It's a cycle, but my point is that the cycles aren't predictable.

I mean, you can stop the cycle.

You can reverse the cycle.

Countries can and do change their trajectory.

I've lived a lot of my life in Poland.

First went there in the 1980s.

My husband is Polish and so on.

Poland is a completely different country from what it was 30 years ago.

And it's a country that has really changed itself in ways that weren't necessarily predictable in 1990.

And so I do think countries change.

And therefore, if we understand human nature as the constant, then one can almost predict these, dare I say the word again, cycles of how humans will go from there to... Human nature is a constant, but there's so much accident in history and so many random things happen that you can sometimes predict how people will react, but you can't necessarily...

predict exactly what's coming.

You know, when Boris Yeltsin was drunk and sick and had to choose the next leader of Russia, there were a number of choices he had.

And the person he chose was Vladimir Putin, who at the time was a very low ranking.

I mean, he was a FSB, he came from the KGB, and he was someone they chose because they thought he would be loyal to the Yeltsin family and he wouldn't prosecute them.

Nobody imagined him as a dictator or an imperial leader who would be seeking to reconquer the former Soviet Union.

And what if they'd chosen, for example, Boris Nemtsov, who was another leading Russian politician at the time?

You know, I don't know that he was a perfect Democrat, but he was very open-minded and he would have been interested in integrating Russia with Europe, okay?