{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/k649p2x82v/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Interview with Robert Legvold, July 8, 2022"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/212/original/LOHI_aviarybanner2.jpg?1741032082","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2022-07-08 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Interviewer"]},"value":{"en":["Scott, Blake"]}},{"label":{"en":["Interviewee"]},"value":{"en":["Legvold, Robert"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eIn this interview, Robert Legvold discusses his decades-long efforts to study and engage in US-Soviet, and later US-Russian, relations, from the early 1960s into the present (2022). In particular, he describes his experiences and perspectives of Track II diplomacy. Robert grew up in the American midwest paying close attention to the events of the Cold War, and from those early lessons, he decided to focus his undergraduate and graduate studies on international relations. After dissertation research in West Africa in the late 1960s, analyzing the influence of the Soviet Union in the region, Robert’s interests expanded to a global analysis of US-Soviet relations. Under the mentorship of Marshal D. Schulman, a former US diplomat and scholar of Soviet studies, Robert became one of the foremost experts on diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. He taught at Tufts University in the Department of Political for over a decade, before relocating to Columbia University to fill the teaching position previously held by his mentor, Marshal Schulman. Robert recounts, in this interview, his first-hand experience of the Cold War, its end in the early 1990s, and the dangers of increasing tensions between the United States and Russia in the twenty-first century. \u003c/p\u003e (abstract)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Contributing Institution"]},"value":{"en":["College of Charleston Libraries"]}},{"label":{"en":["Media Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject - Personal or Corporate"]},"value":{"en":["Legvold, Robert","Schulman, Marshal D."]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject - Topical"]},"value":{"en":["Cold War","International relations","Track two diplomacy"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject - Geographic"]},"value":{"en":["New York (N.Y.)","Russia","Soviet Union"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type IMT"]},"value":{"en":["video/mp4"]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCopyright © College of Charleston\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date Digital"]},"value":{"en":["2022-08-15"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eIn this interview, Robert Legvold discusses his decades-long efforts to study and engage in US-Soviet, and later US-Russian, relations, from the early 1960s into the present (2022). In particular, he describes his experiences and perspectives of Track II diplomacy. Robert grew up in the American midwest paying close attention to the events of the Cold War, and from those early lessons, he decided to focus his undergraduate and graduate studies on international relations. After dissertation research in West Africa in the late 1960s, analyzing the influence of the Soviet Union in the region, Robert\u0026rsquo;s interests expanded to a global analysis of US-Soviet relations. Under the mentorship of Marshal D. Schulman, a former US diplomat and scholar of Soviet studies, Robert became one of the foremost experts on diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. He taught at Tufts University in the Department of Political for over a decade, before relocating to Columbia University to fill the teaching position previously held by his mentor, Marshal Schulman. Robert recounts, in this interview, his first-hand experience of the Cold War, its end in the early 1990s, and the dangers of increasing tensions between the United States and Russia in the twenty-first century.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCopyright \u0026copy; College of Charleston\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Lowcountry Digital Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Lowcountry Digital Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/212/original/LOHI_aviarybanner2.jpg?1741032082","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/165/001/small/Legvold_Robert_July2022.mp4_1660659002.jpg?1660659004","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Legvold_Robert_July2022.mp4"]},"duration":6566.688,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/165/001/small/Legvold_Robert_July2022.mp4_1660659002.jpg?1660659004","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-cofc.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/165/001/original/Legvold_Robert_July2022.mp4?1660658998","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":6566.688,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Transcript of Robert Legvold Interview, July 8, 2022 [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nOkay, we're recording. My name is Blake Scott and today is July 7th, 2022. And the name of this project is the EWI Society Oral History Project. I'm at the College of Charleston. For the record, could you state your name, date of birth, and place of birth?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4.0,24.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nI'm Robert Legvold. I was born February 26th, 1940, and I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=24.0,31.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nThank you, Robert, and thanks for joining us today. To start, I think it'd be useful for myself and also future listeners if you could tell us about how you first became interested in international relations. Were there experiences growing up or in school that stand out that shaped your commitments to this field?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=31.0,51.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nI'm not sure how soon it began. I was aware of important events when I was in high school. When I was in high school we had the Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe in 1956, in Hungary in particular. We had, as I was going off to college, and I started at the University of Chicago in 1959, we had the arrival of Castro in Cuba. And I remember among friends there was these heated discussions about whether this was real progress, it was good for Cuba, and the United States ought to develop a constructive relationship with this guy or whether he was dangerous. It was before he associated himself with the Soviet Union and communists, including the Communist Party in Cuba. So, at that stage, he was seen as a kind of nationalist freedom fighter in general. So there was a lot of stuff going in international relations.\n\nBut when I started college, my intention was to be, like many freshmen that are not there to be doctors, was to be a lawyer. As it unfolded, I took courses in history and political science. I was a double major in history and political science. And increasingly I became more interested in international relations than in public administration, or law, or constitutional law, the other courses that I was taking as an undergraduate and made my commitment by the time I was coming out of my junior year to a career in the foreign service. And I chose a school, the Fletcher School, rather than Harvard or Columbia where I had admission, because they were known for training people that went into the foreign service. That wasn't the only reason. The other reason was a particular individual who was at Fletcher.\n\nBut it was sort of as a young person from wishing to be a lawyer or aspiring to be a lawyer to then thinking, well, maybe public international law. And then increasingly it shifted into the study of international relations as such. And in the course, I took the foreign service exam and was eligible to go in the foreign service and there was a delay for a medical reason. But along the way I decided, no, I didn't want to spend the first part of my career stamping passports or issuing visas in some consular service, wherever, I wanted to be able to deal not just with international relations, but by then I was very interested in pursuing academic work on the Soviet Union, U.S.-Soviet relations.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=51.0,223.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nInteresting. I have two follow up questions to that. One is trying to get back into that time, in terms of how were you learning about these issues? Are you hanging out at coffee shops or are they [through] newspapers? How is information coming in about what's going on with the Cold War or what's going on in 1956?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=223.0,246.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, it was rather shallow, I was, as a high school student and even as a college student. I took courses in international relations. I'm not sure that I ever took a course in Soviet politics. The instructor that was teaching that course, it wasn't his specialty and I wasn't that impressed by him as an instructor in any event. But it was in that day, the Soviet, and that's the reason why I went in that direction, the Soviet Union was so central to everything in international relations. It was even larger in terms of sort of a central focus for foreign policy than China is or is becoming today. And I think I've said it to other people, were I a young person now and making decisions the way I made them at the time, almost certainly I would choose to be a China specialist. But at that time, the Soviet Union was at the very center of things.\n\nAnd so it was in the daily news, as I said, around events like 1956. And then in graduate school, by then I'd already made my commitment, but again, it was central in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everything seemed to revolve around it. And even in 1960, which is really why in the end I ended up writing my dissertation on the Soviets in Africa, that was the year of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and everything that was happening in the Congo during that period of time. So, I had instructors who were telling me, by that time I was leaving college and entering graduate school, that Africa was now going to be a new central arena of U.S.-Soviet competition in the third world, which tended to be something of a focus up to about 1965. But by then our attention had again returned to Southeast Asia, to Vietnam, the war there, and developments within the Middle East. But to answer your question, it was primarily in reading the newspapers, maybe in reading a Newsweek or a Time article.\n\nI'm not sure, maybe by the time I was a sophomore or junior in college I was reading Foreign Affairs and then I would be a little more serious. But by and large, it was the media that was available to you at that point and the media was basically the newspapers and one of the three or all three of the major news channels. There wasn't cable. I didn't pay any attention. There was no channel two or no PBS, if you will, with a News Hour or specials of those kind, it was basically the evening news, NBC, ABC, and CBS, and weekly news magazines and newspapers. But there is one thing about that and when I think back to that experience as opposed to what young people are exposed to these days, where there is such a proliferation and diversification of information sources, even before you get to social media, which is where most young people are getting their news these days, but even in terms of print and media otherwise, the cable and so on, but it doesn't have a coherence.\n\nIn fact, it plays to whatever bias you have. You can go hunting for whatever kind of news you want to get. In my day, I couldn't. It was a more or less coherent story within the range of opinion that existed among opinion writers in the New York Times, or in the local newspaper, or at that point people like Walter Cronkite on CBS or the joint newscasters on NBC. They tried to keep it as what they regarded as neutral as possible. So you didn't have these powerful cross currents of ideas or analysis that you have today. And as a result, I think I sort of entered, certainly entered college and went through college with a kind of coherent view of the U.S. and Soviet Union within the range in which people disagreed about those subjects, but not the way in which you see it today in the media.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=246.0,524.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nThat's an interesting point to try to work on some more. What was this coherent view when you were in college and coming into graduate school in terms of U.S.-Soviet relations?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=524.0,536.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, it was that the Soviet Union was a serious threat. Some of it was exaggerated. When I was a kid, grade school, you'd go to movies and there would be these path news segments, black and white, and this would be the Soviet Union in the early 1950s and there'd be something that would show a map. I remember having been at a movie and seeing one of these news specials with a paint can that spilled what presumably was red paint, but it was black and white and you could sort of see it seeping across Europe into the West and that was the Russian threat. Not the Russian, the Soviet threat at that point. And then you had all of these episodes. I was just getting out of grade school when you had the first interventions in 1953 in East Germany and I didn't know much about that. I didn't pay much attention to that, but the atmosphere in general from that and forward was the Soviets are a threat.\n\nAnd by 1954, 1956, you had Khrushchev who at various points in a somewhat reckless way would, what we call, we still refer to it as nuclear rocket rattling. You've heard that expression. That goes back to this period of '55, '56, when Khrushchev was sort of sounding off, threatening Great Britain in various contexts of the Soviet-UK relationship. So, the assumption was that Russia was the primary focus for U.S. policy. That focus was on an adversary. It was an adversary that was militarily dangerous and its interventions in Eastern Europe were illegitimate. They were prepared to not only impose their regime in an anti-democratic fashion on the Soviet Union, and the people of the Soviet Union, and all of his republics, but they were holding Eastern Europe in the same kind of iron grasp, anti-democratic, authoritarian.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=536.0,668.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nAnd the threat was not just that Russia was ambitious, or we thought ambitious, and determined to continue expanding as it had at the end of World War II, if they had a chance to do so, but that it was driven by a kind of ideological animus. The Soviets believed in a fundamentally different kind of economic and political system. Its nature was anti-democratic, its character was anti-capitalist. It was [a] physically planned economy. So, you put all that together with this remaining or other superpower, because Europe after all, until at least the early years of the 1950s or mid 50s, was something of a power vacuum given the devastation of World War II. And the same thing was true in East Asia, China was still suffering from the effects post '49. Nobody was really thinking about China as anything other than the lap dog of the Soviet Union, which made the Soviet Union even more threatening in the context of Korea and East Asia.\nJapan was at that point still recovering from World War II. So, in a global setting that was filled with, if you will, political vacuums and you had this other power, the Soviet Union, that was of the nature that I just described, that became absolutely central to anybody that thought about international relations. So as somebody in college, I said, well, no, this is what I want to study. This is what I want to work on. And I want to do that even if I go into the foreign service, I would hope I'd be posted in ways that would directly address this question of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. But as I say, I changed my mind in the course of graduate school and then the focus was going to be academic, and it was not with an aspiration of going to a think tank. It was always, I want to be on a faculty. I want to teach.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=668.0,786.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nI'm curious from your time in graduate school and through your career as an academic, did your view that was maybe shared by society at the time in the early 60s... how did that view for you personally change of the Soviet Union? Did that coherency…?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=786.0,803.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, a step before that. A step before that is, why did I choose the Fletcher School? I said, because I at that point was interested in the foreign service and that was a school that had a reputation of training a lot of people that went into the diplomatic service. I probably wouldn't have thought about it if I was going to get a PhD, even though I got my PhD there. I did that by taking a number of courses in area studies at Harvard, you could do that. Fletcher had a joint program with Harvard. But the other and primary reason was the person who was there and that person was Marshall Shulman. Shulman, again, though you ask about my sources of information, I think in reading either Parade magazine, or almost certainly it was Parade magazine, it wasn't an academic or quasi academic journal, I ran across a piece by Marshall Shulman.\n\nAnd it was at that point, it would've been 1962 probably after the Cuban... No, not yet the Cuban Missile Crisis, probably early in '62. And his was such a balanced analysis and nuanced in terms of how complex the U.S.-Soviet relationship was. And it was basically what Marshall would in the long run be, somebody who believed in engaging the Soviets, of negotiating. He was somebody who constantly worked for dialogue with the Russians. He was one of the principal figures in the early phases of track II diplomacy. He had been an advisor to Acheson and then in the White House under Truman coming out of World War II. And he had continued to be active with policymakers, but always pushing them in this direction. He would, by 1977, it was the reason I went to Columbia from Tufts, he would join the Carter Administration.\n\nHe was close to Cy Vance. He became an advisor of Cy Vance. But in any case, in this early essay that I read, Marshall Shulman was this person who seemed to me to be balanced, and sophisticated, and nuanced, and above all else constructive as opposed to sort of the Cold War hawk view that was dominant within much of the country. And he was teaching at Fletcher so I said, no, I want to go to Fletcher to study with this guy. He would eventually, even before I left Fletcher, he would shift to Columbia and he'd become Director there eventually at what is now known as the Harriman Institute. But that was the other reason that I went. So now when you ask, how did my view begin changing? It had begun changing at that point.\n\nThen I studied with him at Fletcher. He was not soft on the Soviets. He didn't for a moment underestimate either the ugliness of the regime itself and how it dealt with its people and he certainly didn't underestimate the potential threat that it posed. He was especially interested in the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship. And in the early work, when he joined the first of the Pugwash meetings, which were held primarily among the senior physicists that had worked on thermonuclear weapons, nuclear things, both on the Soviet side and on the U.S. side, he was the social scientist who could help the two sides understand one another or understand why they couldn't understand one another. And that came through in his courses. But I remember at least in one seminar where a student had made use almost exclusively of the revisionist historians of the Cold War, a man named Denna Fleming, who was at Vanderbilt, did a two-volume history of the Cold War and William Appleman Williams, who was another Cold War historian. You may somewhere run across them.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=803.0,1059.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nI have.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=1059.0,1059.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nBut they basically blamed everything that had gone wrong in the Cold War on the U.S., and they were seen as revisionist historians of what was seen as sort of classical history of the Cold War. And this student had relied exclusively on Denna Fleming and William Appleman Williams for the paper that was written and report that was given in the seminar. And Shulman came down on her in this case, like a hammer. So he wasn't soft in that respect, but that experience in his classes, working with him, became the kind of full blown experience that I'd sensed in choosing Fletcher because of the article that he wrote. And through the rest of my career I would be close to him. I replaced him at Columbia. We often had conversations in Washington, back in New York when he was in the Carter Administration, including his frustrations with the Vance Brzezinski conflict over how you deal with the Soviet Union at a time when things went wrong in Afghanistan in '79, that's when he was there.\n\nAnd much of my approach to the subject over time has really been a knockoff of the personality and approach of Marshall Shulman. In fact, I once gave the... I was asked to give the plenary for one of the IISS conferences and I remember afterwards Christoph Bertram, who was the Director of IISS... This was probably in the late 70s at a time when we had team B in the U.S. and others who were arguing that we'd really underestimated in the Carter Administration. The Soviet Union made big mistakes with signing the original SALT agreement and so on. And one of them, I was actually a friend of Paul Nitze for a variety of reasons, but he certainly disagreed with what I had to say and a couple of others and they went after Christoph Bertram.\n\nAnd part of their criticism, the reason for this windy story, is they said, \"Well, the problem with Legvold is that he's been Shulman- ized.\" I said, when Marshall died and in my tribute to him, the memorial, I repeated that story. And I said, I never quite understood that. That sounded more like something that you do to your car than what you do to a person. But in any case, as I say, I'm very much a product of Marshall and those experiences.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=1059.0,1224.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nI want to ask a question about timeline, but then in terms of activities you were involved in. Just so we're thinking of the chronology, what year did you more or less, or not more or less, exactly, what year did you enter as a professor? And then once you're a professor, how did you begin to think about engaging in some of the things that you're studying? There's one thing to teach and write, and I know you're doing those, but then how did you begin to imagine practicing activities such as dialogue between the U.S. and Soviet relations?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=1224.0,1256.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, I started graduate school in '62. I went through the regular graduate program, exams and the rest, then I did a year of field work in Africa for the book that I mentioned to you earlier, it's called Soviet Policy in West Africa. That was the dissertation, then it turned into a book and I finished the dissertation in '67. And I started teaching immediately at Tufts at that point. And I guess the beginning of the answer to your question is the firsthand experience that I'd had in engaging Soviets, diplomats, as a result of that year of field research, because I would, whether it was Dakar, Senegal, or whether it was in Accra in Ghana, or Lagos in Nigeria, I'd go to the embassy, and I would try to interview people in the embassy.\n\nAnd I had experiences that certainly broadened my understanding beyond anything that I'd learned in graduate school. I'll give you one story. I was in Accra in Ghana, this would've been in 1966. That's the year that Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in Ghana. And I ended up in the embassy and I was trying to understand what I'd been working through in the way in which you were sort of taught to think about it, it was the ideological framework that we associated with the Soviet Union. They had in their ideology, the chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, a notion of national liberation, revolution, and what countries qualified for that. And then they had another notion of a more revolutionary group, which had a category and they put into that after the revolution, Mali and Algeria for a period of time.\n\nAnd Ghana had fit into that for a period of time while Nkrumah was in power. And it was after they had sort of come to terms with and embraced Castro and Cuba, and understood that someone like Castro could become a communist and associate himself with the world of communism, and so why not in Nkrumah, why not Modibo Keïta in Mali, and so on. And so I was sitting down with this Russian diplomat and I started by asking them about various Ghanaian leaders that they had dealt with around in the Nkrumah regime. And I said, are they... Because these categories were sort of quasi Marxist Leninist, so I would start, and I'd say, did you see so and so as a genuine Marxist Leninist during this regime? And this fellow would just sort of shake his head and would say, \"No, not really.\" And I went through even more what I thought were rigorous examples of this until I got to a fellow whose name was Kofi Batsa. And Kofi Batsa had been the head of the Ideological Institute in Winneba in Ghana. And it had a relationship with the Central Party School, which was the ideological agency within the Soviet Union. He'd also been the editor of a Ghanaian newspaper called The Spark, which was a takeoff of Lenin's original newspaper in Russian, which was Iskra, which is the Russian word for spark. So I thought this was certainly my prime candidate. I said, \"And Kofi Batsa, did you see him as a Marxist Leninist?\" And this diplomat's shoulder sort of sagged, he'd almost had it with his callow youth that he was sitting in front of, and he said, \"Hell no, he was a juvenile delinquent.\"\n\nAnd at that point I understood that this Leninist framework that we were brought up to think about, interpreting what we were reading in this controlled media, trying to read between the lines of Kommunist or the other journals in international affairs within the Soviet Union, no, there was another reality out there. So I had that experience walking into the classroom and it meant that somewhere along the line in this combination of notions, that this was a complex relationship, it posed a very real challenge, but it also was accompanied by this notion that our capacity to really change anything, change the regime for example, or even change the pattern of Russian behavior in its foreign policy was limited. We didn't have the kind of direct control that we had over a defeated Germany at the end of World War II or a defeated Japan at the end of World War II.\n\nSo if our influence was sort of 2% at the margin, how do you maximize that? And my assumption was extending the Shulman influence, and there were other people that thought that way, there were certainly classmates of mine that were thinking in the same way that were now beginning to teach, and there was a broader part of the profession that thought in these terms, was sort of not to impose that view on students. My notion all along from being the first years as an assistant professor to when I retired, my role was never to persuade them that there was a superior point of view, let alone that that superior point of view was mine. It always was to expose them to alternative views, but the best representation of those alternative views. And therefore, I had no problem defending my own point of view, but it wasn't by arguing that this is right. It's for you to judge once you're exposed to other things.\n\nBut that view was always part of the way in which I taught. And when students have gotten back to me over the years, and some of them have done it often after a very long lapse, in the course of the pandemic and then the Ukrainian war, at least three of my students got back in touch with me that I had when I was a teacher, assistant professor at Tufts. And the last one that called me, somehow the issue of age came up and he said, \"Well, I'm 74.\" I had him as a sophomore, but one of the things that students say when they get back in touch was that that sort of approach to the issues that we were studying in the day had stuck with them through a lifetime. And they had retained that sort of approach. Not that they necessarily remembered everything that was done within the courses, but that approach had mattered to them, so it's a combination of how my views had evolved by that point, how it intersected with my teaching, and what my direct experience had with the teaching. Now, the other thing that I would add is that, fairly soon into my teaching career, I think by 1975, so that's about eight years into my teaching career, for the first time, again, at the initiative of Shulman, I was involved in a Track II exchange with the Soviets. It was sponsored by the Stanford Research Institute. I was the youngest person considerably within the group. They were senior people in the field. Marshall was a key figure in it, but so was Richard Pipes, the historian at Harvard, and a number of other senior scholars of that kind. And then on the Soviet side, there was a similar range.\n\nThe senior figure in that was a man named Alexei Arbatov, who was... Georgy Arbatov, Alexei's son. Georgy Arbatov, who's the head of newly formed institute in 1959 called Institute for US and Canada, very prominent. Very close to Brezhnev in the regime. But then the youngest person in that delegation was my age. And it was the beginning of what would be a number of Track II efforts that I was involved with. That occurred right after the... I said '75, but it was right after October, 1973 war in the Middle East. So, there were real tense relations. And again, I saw the effect of Marshall in this context because there was a point where one of the senior figures in their delegation was Yevgeny Primakov, who would eventually become the director of the major Institute there, the Institute of International... That's what he was at the time. The Institute of World Economy and International Politics. He would go on to become senior within the Soviet leadership. Eventually he was prime minister under Yeltsin. He was a foreign minister during the period of time with Gorbachev.\n\nBut at that point he was within the academy. And there was an exchange between Primakov and Pipes about the Arab Israeli issue. I think in which Pipes said to him at one point, \"Well, if the Soviets and their Arab friends don't begin to recognize reality will be at a point where Israel is like Samson and the temple.\" And the exchange was about to explode and come apart with nothing that would work. And Marshall at that point intervened, and over the next 10 minutes he began reminding each side of what our respective positions were, why we were adhering to the intervention or making the kinds of interventions that we were making, and where we ought to be searching for common ground. It took them about 10 minutes and it put the thing back on track. And we ended up having a very productive Track II exchange.\n\nI saw that on a number of occasions. So that experience too reinforced this notion that in a complex and challenging relationship that had its dangers, you kept your powder dry. You didn't lay down your guard. You didn't come hat in hand in dealing with the Soviet Union at any one point. But if your influence was only on the margin, it was 2%. And the relationship was as I described it, then you needed to engage. You needed to have dialogue. You needed to see where you could find the common ground. You needed to do what Marshall did and the story I just told you, but at a level of government to government, and I still believe that of all international relations. I believe that in all of these alienated relationships, including the Post 79, relationship with Iran, the relationship that we've had with Cuba since 1959, the relationship we're now developing in the wrong direction with China. So, this is not just for the US-Soviet relationship. This is my notion of international relations.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=1256.0,1966.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nThis track II diplomacy, it's talked about quite a bit in university circles, but especially the students who are interested in engaging it at some point, when you get into that room, how are those conversations started and facilitated to maintain a dialogue? Are there any tricks or moments that you remember that are important for...?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=1966.0,1992.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, the first thing I would say is that, the character of the phenomena of Track II diplomacy depends on the period that you're talking about. The first of the Track II exercises, that between Pugwash and then a little bit later, the Dartmouth exchanges traced back to 1958. That was the very opening where people were able to travel back and forth. And at that point, I was still in high school. And those contacts were very tentative. And my understanding is, they were very gingerly open, but they were held between professionals who weren't engaged in international relations as such. They were nuclear physicists. So, they had something they could talk about in common, the science itself, the hard science. And then Marshall, as I say, early on began to help them understand what the broader social political context was for the conversation they were having.\n\nAnd how they then built on that, I'm not sure. They had to have confidence. You didn't do it in one session. You did it over a series of sessions. And since, at that point, governments were not having much success in talking about this. And so governments on both sides, both Moscow and Washington listened to them. They were debriefed by government officials on both sides. They ended up having an influence. Matt Evangelista has written a book, the political scientist on Track II. He's at Cornell. I forget what he called it, but you have no trouble discovering it. You'll see that in these early years, there was quite significant synergy between the Track II, as it developed from its primitive forms, but in a way that was less primitive than what governments were doing in their negotiations.\n\nBy the time I was a part of it, there had already been that experience. That is the proof that you could, depending on the ups and downs, the Cuban missile crisis, it'd happened during one of the Pugwash Conferences. And as I understand the history of it, it almost sabotaged it, but then because they were able to do what happened and the one I just described for you, they were able to keep it going. But as I say, those experiences were then reflected by the time I was involved with Track II, but then it depended on what was happening in the relationship. So that by the time you got to the Carter administration, when things again began to go off the rails with the Afghan war, and the fact that we were attempting to put the Soviet Union at arm's length.\n\nYou remember that after the Afghan war, the Soviet intervention in '79, I should have said, we then boycotted the Olympics in the Soviet Union. We cut off a lot of times, a lot of ties, Aeroflot couldn't fly to the United States. And that affects Track II. But there are some Track IIs that say, \"Okay,\" or people who have been participating would say, \"No, I don't want to be part of something with the Soviets that have just invaded Afghanistan.\"\n\nOthers say, \"No, this is a time when we need to continue talking.\" And so, you begin again a little bit. You're dealing with people that know one another. You're not starting with a fresh cast, but you're starting in a new circumstance. And you have to, again, feel your way forward if it continues, but those experiences of things being disrupted by what happens were true, again, say in 1999, during Kosovo, when at an official level, again, we cut things off. We had NATO-Russia Council where the Russians were part of it, obviously. NATO-Russia Council. And because of what we had done in Kosovo, the Russians pulled out of the NATO-Russia Council. And that had a dimming effect or a diluting effect on the ongoing Track II in that context.\n\nBut to come to your basic question, what makes a Track II work? I would say basically three things. People who believe in dialogue on both sides, even if that can work, even if they start in a way that's skeptical. The other one that I've been a part of before I go on to the other, what I see as criteria for good Track II. The other Track II is something the Carnegie Corporation created as the Soviet Union was beginning to appear in a new and important transition under Gorbachev by 1985. Carnegie Corporation created a set of meetings that were exclusively for US legislators, senators, and congress people. And they tried to get a good representation. Then they brought experts for a weeklong session. No Soviets were involved. It wasn't Track II. It was designed to help people in the congress, particularly those that would have any a role in the foreign policy related committees within the senate and with the house to understand what might be happening in the Soviet Union.\n\nAnd that unfolded over a number of years until they began after, I think the fourth year or so. Began inviting a Russian to those meetings. Now in that context, one of the first people invited was Alan Simpson, a very conservative Senator from the State of Wyoming, a wonderful guy, terrific dry sense of humor, but very skeptical. Dick Clark, the former senator from Iowa who lost an election who was running this Aspen Institute exercise with funding from the Carnegie Corporation, did a lot of talking and arm twisting to get Alan to be part of it. But the more he was part of it, the more he bought into it. And once there was even the chance for dialogue, he bought into that. And there was then a very special thing that we did in 1988 under that auspices where Carnegie Corporation no longer part of the Aspen Institute but made use of that took five people from the United States and went to the Soviet Union in '88.\n\nThis was before Gorbachev announced that the Russians were going to withdraw from Afghanistan, get out of their Vietnam. And it included Sam Nunn and Carl Levin from Michigan, the senator and Alan Simpson. And then Sid Drell, the physicist from Stanford and me. And we had meetings with the senior Soviet people. We had a meeting with Gorbachev. We had a meeting with, at that point, the foreign minister, Shevardnadze, with the chairman of joint chiefs of staff, Akhromeyev. And by that time, Simpson, the guy I'm describing had fully bought into the notion that you want dialogue. And he was a hardline Republican Hawk going into this. So the first thing, as I say for successful Cold War history, and I'll make this shorter, because I'm now using too much of your time for these stories, was people who believed in dialogue or at least who were candidates who could come to believe in dialogue.\n\nThen secondly, what you needed were people who in that context, were depending on the nature of the dialogue, the grassroots, then it can just be the average American that needs to come to understand the other side, the average Soviet or average Russian needs to come to understand the other country and the human nature of the other party. But if it's one that's trying to make progress on policy issues, they need to be informed. They need not be specialists, Soviet specialists on the US side, Russian specialists or Americanists on the Russian side. But if the issue is how you're making progress in arms control or how you're dealing with regional instability, including problems in the Middle East, then you need people who know the issues in that area. And it helps to mix in that, again, for this role that Shulman played, or even for the expertise itself, some who are specialists on the other country.\n\nSo, that's the second thing. You need the kind expertise along the way. And then the third thing is, you need time. You don't make progress the first time you launch something like this. And even the iterative process is important. So long as a record is kept and you've got continuity. So the people who are organizing it, know what's been accomplished before. Even if there's some movement in terms of the members who are coming for these meetings, you don't necessarily have to report on everything that's happened before. Generally, you don't.\n\nYou start maybe with a new crack at the agenda, or you may even start with a new agenda. But at least most of the people that have been involved, have been engaged with one another before. And they've dealt with issues that are basically related over a period of time. So, those three things I think are necessary to good Track II. And that's relevant to ESI because they were above all else, an institute that was committed to Track II. The way in which they began on Middle East. And then when they began shifting some of their attention to US-Soviet and what they're doing even now.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=1992.0,2614.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nRobert, that was the next set of questions I was going to ask you about. Do you want to break at all for water or anything?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=2614.0,2622.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nNo, I'm fine.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=2622.0,2623.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nYou're ready to keep going. Okay. You got lots of stories to tell. I appreciate it. I'm just enjoying listening.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=2623.0,2629.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, I'll stop telling stories because you've got ground you want to count…","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=2629.0,2632.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nNo, no. I like the stories. I think that's the material that people will really appreciate over the long term. If they want the theory and concepts, they can return to your books. But I think the experiences that guided you to those theories and concepts are pretty important. Now in terms of EWI, could you tell us a little bit about how you first heard of EWI or what your relationship was with EastWest Institute","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=2632.0,2658.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nMy memory's foggy, so I may be wrong in some of what I tell you. And the record may correct me. I didn't know much about the EastWest Institute at its founding, or even in the first couple of years when it was really focused on Israel in the Middle East, but they were becoming interested even in that context in the Soviet angle, obviously that was important to the work they were doing on the Middle East. And somewhere along the line, I'm not quite sure when or how John got in touch with me. By then I was at Columbia. The institute was in New York. And John, if I remember correctly was a graduate of Fletcher as well. So, there was that connection.\n\nAt the outset, I think he wanted talk to me about the ideas they had for the things that they were going to be doing. And I doubt less, I don't remember the detail of it. Shared with them what I could in terms of what I thought looked promising of what they were talking about or not. And by that time we were organizing program. They may have been doing it for some time. So, they would have these study groups, or they'd have these seminars. And then they started inviting me to where they thought I was relevant or it would be relevant to me. And I went to a couple of those. Somewhere along the line in that stage, John then invited me to their annual conferences.\n\nAnd that was before the major one that I remember, which was in 1991, which was an annual conference that was held in Europe right before the Berlin Wall came down. And I remember that they had someone from East Germany at that meeting who spoke quite openly of what was going on. And it was really eye-opening for all of the participants in the conference. But then to go back a step or two, at some point, John asked if I would be on what they were regarded as their advisory council. It wasn't their board, but their advisory council that had, I think primarily academics. And I don't remember the years of that. That'll be in the history of the institute. And I served on that for two or three years. It was not terribly active. They had a few meetings and the advisory council would try to help with ideas that they were discussing and otherwise, but I don't remember it as something that was central to the activity of the institute.\n\nThe board was far more important to John. John interacted with the board far more intensely. And John was somebody who liked to interact at that level. And from a very early stage, I was impressed by the kinds of contacts that he had developed that allowed him to run the program that he did, including his annual conference. He was by that time, dealing with national leadership in a number of countries, including not summarily senior figures within foreign ministry or within the president or chancellor's office. But even at times, I think he knew foreign ministers and interacted with them. He liked that. He was a high flyer. He was an extraordinarily engaging guy. You have, I'm sure many, many photos of him or even film of him, but those will always be with a smile. What they don't show is that at any point, John had a smile on his face.\n\nI don't remember John with a straight face, even in a conversation like you and I are having, there was always that smile on his face. And it always came with an entrepreneurial turn. He always had something in mind that he wanted to come out of that conversation or that would enhance the institute or would allow him to do something more. He was a big planner. He had really big plans for the institute. They often ran ahead during the period I knew it. And I think it continued to be the case, the actual resources that he had generated for the institute. And it was through those years, something of a one man show given the power of his personality and the rest from my perspective. But my perspective, it wasn't close enough to be reliable.\n\nOther people that you'll talk to who have been intricately involved. One of my PhD students and a fellow then was for me a while the assistant director at the Harriman Institute went on to be the assistant director, the number two at the EastWest Institute. That's Allen Lynch, who's been a long time faculty member in political science at the University of Virginia as a Soviet now Russian specialist. And in those years, which probably followed the point at which I had withdrawn, may have gone to international conference, but was no longer advisory council. And I'd see John at various meetings and we'd interact. But at that point, Allen would have far more detail of what was happening in the institute. And correct what I've said about what had happened beforehand.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=2658.0,3016.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nI appreciate the perspective, and obviously the context we're thinking about Track II diplomacy and your interests. When you did meet with John, what did you talk about? And then from your perspective, what did you hope to achieve by engaging the institute?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3016.0,3033.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, John was somebody who believed very much in dialogue. That had been the inspiration for what he was doing on the Middle East. So, he was someone who came in with a notion of, how do we do things that engage the Russians, the Soviets during that period of time, and in a way that doesn't duplicate what is going on with other Track II kinds of activities? Or what's going on in terms of the program at the Council on Foreign Relations? Because at some point during that period I had left Columbia for a few years to be senior fellow and director of the Soviet project at the council on foreign relations. So, he was conscious, he was a member of the council. He was conscious of what was going on in other New York institutions like EastWest Institute.\n\nSo we would compare program notes, and he was filled with ideas. I don't remember all of them, even the innovative ideas of where he wanted to go institutionally, let alone program that is subject matter for seminars or otherwise. I just remember that it was quite creative, and he certainly was a very active mind and dealing with it. But I was at that point interacting and continue to, although on a lesser scale now, but over the years, interacting with a lot of people who had a lot of things going in various ways. So, I probably don't distinguish any one of those bilateral relationships from the one that I had with John, other than remember the personality, remember the ambition, and remember the basic orientation, political orientation that he had in this context.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3033.0,3152.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nFrom your experience at that time in the... By this time, you're at Columbia and you're involved in various bilateral projects in New York and across the Atlantic, what were some of the projects and the initiatives that you were involved in as the Cold War, and in our historical sense was coming to an end? What were some of the projects you were doing?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3152.0,3176.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, as I said, I went from Tufts to Columbia in 1976, 1977, as Shulman was joining the Carter administration. And at that point... What I'm trying to think of the sequence now, I'm trying to think of the years that I was at the Council on Foreign Relations. I was at the Council on Foreign Relations for a five or a six-year period. I had gone from Tufts to Columbia for, I think, a year. I'm trying to think of what year that was. Maybe that may have been-","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3176.0,3239.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nThe exact year is less important as opposed to the-","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3239.0,3243.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, I need to make sure about the year, because that'll be relevant to the way in which I answer your question.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3243.0,3250.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nOkay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3250.0,3250.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nSo I went from Tufts to Columbia for a year, I forget... It must have been 1970, 1972. And then while I was at Columbia, Winston Lord was president of the council… and he had called Shulman to see whom he would recommend as somebody to run their program at the Council on Foreign Relations. And Shulman mentioned me. So, Lord got in touch with me and I agreed to. There was not going to be a permanent position at Columbia. At that point, Marshall was the permanent guy there. So, I went to the council on the assumption that I'd be there for three years, the initial contract, and then in the end, Winston wanted to extend it and I wanted to stay.\n\nSo, I stayed another three years. So over that period of time to get to your question, what I was doing was a series of projects. There were basically books and we did six books at the council on various aspects of the US-Soviet relationship. Most of them were volumes that I edited by bringing in senior specialists on topics. One topic was Eastern Europe as an issue in US-Soviet relations. And I had a whole series... I would edit it and write the introduction and the conclusion. But the other major scholars wrote critical chapters in it. There was a volume on US-Soviet relations in general, again, with senior scholars that contributed to it. There was another one on our project, it didn't turn into a volume, but it was an idea that I had. Everybody had begun speaking during those years about interdependence and how that was changing international politics. At that point Joe Nye and Bob Keohane had written a book on the impact of globalization and interdependence and how it was changing international relations, as opposed to balance of power theory and Hans Morgenthau and all that had gone before. So we did a project again with various people and it ended up being basically a long report rather than a book on what the relevance to the US-Soviet relationships was of this increasingly interdependent world. And there were a lot of things like that. And we also then invited Soviets to come for seminars and for projects. They were not invited to be authors in these projects, but simultaneously during that period of time I was part of these other projects. SRI had continuing seminars, the Dartmouth Project began to have track two programs, and they would continue.\n\nAnd then after six years, Marshall, by this time he had left the Carter administration. That was after Vance left too, you remember Vance left after the catastrophe in Iran. And I think he felt that at that point his voice was no longer valued within the Carter administration. And soon after that Marshall, maybe even before that, I forget the sequence, came back to Columbia, but he would retire within a year. And at that point I had taken a leave from Columbia to do the thing at the Council. And they then put me up for tenure at Columbia with a basic notion that I'd be replacing Marshall. So then in the next sequence, in terms of your question, what began to change was not these kinds of projects that went beyond what I did with my own writing, my own articles and so on, or what I was doing in the classroom. And what was the track two that I've described in at least two ways, SRI and Dartmouth.\n\nBut by the '80s, that is, the Gorbachev period, then I added this business about the Carnegie Corporation's sponsorship of the Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute has a congressional program. You can see it today, but they had a specific segment of it that was devoted to what seemed like now potentially a breakthrough period in US-Soviet relations. But simultaneously you then had the major summits between initially Reagan and Gorbachev, and then Bush and Gorbachev and so on. And the networks, the major networks would cover those live. They would often run day long. And initially Peter Jennings asked if I would come to be comment for ABC on them during the episodes, during the summits themselves, if they had day breaks. Or then I would be with Peter and I would do a commentary or answer his questions on the Evening News, but I would stay with them for the two or three days before and after the summit.\n\nOne exception to that was in 1991 during the coup in Moscow. I was at our place on Cape Cod when I got a call from ABC saying that, \"There is something happening in Moscow, it looks as though there's an effort to oust Gorbachev, and could you get up to the studios in Boston? We'll be covering this story.\" Peter was out in New Mexico having some kind of eye surgery, but we were facing a hurricane here that was forecast that was supposed to be coming to hit Cape Cod. So at 3:00 in the morning I'd done what I could at our place on the Cape, got in my car, was driving up to Boston. You live in Charleston, so you know what it feels like on the eve of or the hours before a hurricane hits. Everything is silent. It's just very humid. Nothing is happening in the air.\n\nAnd I drove up to Boston and then August 19th happened and the 20th, and ABC covered that live all day long. So I had an office at the studio in Boston, and every 15 or 20 minutes I'd leave that office and I'd go to the studio and we'd have further commentary between the two of us. And that was the only time that went all day long into the evening. And that was during the summer. So I could do that because it was August, so I wasn't in school. The other summits, when they were held, I would have to leave for a day or two. So the Washington summit that was held with Gorbachev and Reagan, that was still ABC.\n\nAnd the last of them that I did, I'd stopped doing it, I think ABC no longer was asking someone like me to come and join Peter, but an old friend of mine, somebody who we'd not tried to exploit that friendship for the same kind of thing, he knew what I was doing with Jennings, is Brokaw. But at some point he said, when he knew I wasn't doing things with Jennings any longer, he asked if I would come along for I think what was the '85 summit in Moscow. So the last summit that I did where the networks covered them was in 1985. And I did go with Tom to Moscow for that summit. And I haven't done that kind of thing since the networks no longer do that if there is a summit. The Bush summit ... Well, the last one was the Clinton summit. The Bush summit was in New York, Governor Island.\n\nNo, no, that was still Reagan. That was the last Reagan summit and Bush had been elected. So he was vice president, but Bush as vice president, president elect, met with Gorbachev on Governor Island. So that was still another one of the Reagan summits. But I haven't done that kind of thing. I did a little bit for some of the cable a few years ago, but I don't do that kind of thing any longer. I do respond and have over the years to journalists when they call and they want to talk about a story. Lately that's been less the US media because they now are moving onto a younger generation, rightly so, of commentators, and the ones that they see on media that are on cable, and so then they turn to them. But I still do it for a number of journalists around the world who are in touch from Latin America or from Asia, from India, and so on.\n\nSo I've never sought, never wanted a security clearance. And therefore, when I'm invited, and I did that because I didn't want at any point to have to second-guess myself on what kind of information I can share in conversations or dialogue in order to deepen my understanding of an issue, whether I'm in Russia or whether I'm in Washington. And I've always treated my conversations in that way, as confidential. Over the years when I'd make those trips to the Soviet Union, and I'd come back, often the FBI would be in touch and they would want a debriefing. And I would say, \"I'm happy to talk to you. I'll share with you the substance of what I learned, but I'm not going to associate it with anybody that I talked to. You won't get any information on anybody that I've seen.\"\n\nAnd when I'm in Moscow, if I've had conversations with senior people in Washington, unless I know that they don't mind that I share it with somebody in Moscow, I don't tell them where that source has come from. And that has been the way in which I interact in this triangular world of academics and analysts that are interested in these subjects that I'm part of with track two or that I'm part of when I make independent trips to Russia.\n\nThe other part is the media that want some kind of help at some point. There's less and less of that at this stage in my career. But at one point that was fairly an active part of what I did. And then the third is the policy community, but I've never sought or responded to a position in Washington. I have, when possible, if they want a session, because often there's been less of that now, a session may be organized at the CIA or the State Department would have sessions that normally would be with multiple people. On two occasions the Presidents have wanted sessions. One was with George W. Bush at his place up in Maine, where he met with me and with two others, Arnold Horlick, who was for many years at RAM but had been National Intelligence Officer, and Tim Colton, who was the senior figure at Harvard.\n\nAnd that was when Graham Allison and Yavlinsky on the Russian side, Soviet side at the end of the Gorbachev period had been proposing a kind of Marshall Plan for the Soviet Union, and the Bush administration didn't want that. They wanted that idea to be killed. They were about to have a G7 meeting, but Bush was trying to continue to nurse Gorbachev along. So, they had the three of us up to their place in Maine. We had lunch out, essentially what they wanted was for the three of us at some point, individually or otherwise, to contest this idea of a grand bargain as a bad idea. Their basic position was, \"We don't know whether Gorbachev is going to succeed with so-called Perestroika, the domestic transformation. So before we invest in a large way,\" it happened to be a bad period of time economically for the United States, \"He has to prove to us that he can succeed, that he's not going to get overthrown, and all of this isn't going to come undone.\"\n\nWhereas the Allison-Yavlinsky idea was, in order to help him succeed you need to give him major assistance at this point. But the Bush administration was moving in the other direction. I don't know how many other people they talked to the way in which they had the three of us up. Clinton did the same kind of thing at the White House early on in the Yeltsin administration, and it was right before ... Yeah, he was about to have his first meeting with Yavlinsky, and he was going to meet in Vancouver, Clinton was going to. And Yeltsin had just declared what looked like martial law in Russia at that point. It wasn't, it was not going to operate the same way. And they had me come down for a dinner at the White House, and it was a dinner with, at that point Warren Christopher was Secretary of State, and the Congressman whose name slips my mind now was the Secretary of Defense. That didn't last very long, Strobe Talbott and a couple of other people.\n\nOh, and that night there were three of us that were invited to the dinner, Jim Billington, who was the Librarian of Congress, but a great historian, as you probably know if you know your Russian historians, for many years at Princeton, but then one of the founders of the Kennan Institute and eventually the Librarian of Congress. And I think he was Librarian of Congress at that time, and Condi Rice, who, I don't know what she was doing at that point, but the three of us were invited for dinner to talk about what Clinton should expect when he met with Yeltsin for the first time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=3250.0,4194.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nA question to that. So, your role was to offer some sort of version of objective analysis?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4194.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nYeah, what to expect, what was the right thing to do since Yeltsin had now gone out on a limb, he had declared martial law. And I sat directly across from Clinton, and I was impressed by, A, how quickly he ate his meal so that he could focus on the questions he wanted to ask. But one of the things I said to him was, I thought in these circumstances, since things looked as though they were becoming shakier in Russia, is that they ought to be hedging their bets, that they ought to be reaching out to other parts of the political environment, to other political players. And I didn't say it in a way that, \"Abandon ship, dislodge yourself from Yeltsin,\" but I was making the argument, \"Make sure that you've got your people in the embassy and otherwise establishing contact with a range of other players.\" And Clinton's response to me was, \"Well,\" he said, \"You know, Russia has only one president and that's the man I've got to deal with.\"\n\nSo, he was not open to the idea that they in any way begin hedging. His notion was full speed ahead with Yeltsin and Yeltsin can count on our full support all along the way. There'd be some shaky things that happened in the meantime, because after the seizure of the White House, all of the events of that year that led to the confrontation between Yeltsin, and they ended up firing on the Duma and all of that, they then had elections in the fall. And it turned out that Yeltsin's party did rather poorly in the circumstance, and one of the radical figures within the Russian political constellation did very well. And at that point I know that Strobe and others began rethinking what they'd been pushing because it looked as though it was happening as this full speed ahead with economic reform and a kind of what was called at that point shock therapy in terms of what was done in order to force an economic transition in the country, that they'd have to back off on that.\n\nAnd that was a consequence of the election. But the issue of hedging before that I don't think appealed to them particularly. There were a series of other meetings at the G7 level among finance ministers and so on, and the basic decision was, \"Provide as much support as we possibly can for Yeltsin.\" So again, that's a long story about the second time in terms of that triangular set of relationships, academic, analytical community, media, newspaper people, and then the policy making world, that was the highest level, and then only on those two occasions, I think. There may have been some other stuff that was close to that with the…","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4200.0,4404.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nBut I have a few more.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4404.0,4406.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWith the presidents directly involved.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4406.0,4408.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nI have a few more questions, and I feel like this could be a multi-part interview, but I want try to tie things together at least for this part of our conversation. So, I'll start with the first question here. Now, as you're doing this analysis and you're trying to read different perspectives, you're trying to do it as objectively as possible, but I'm curious, in your own personal feelings, the mood in which you were thinking about the future, as the Cold War is ending and the '90s are coming, what were you thinking personally about that time period? How did that impact you or what were you hoping for at that time?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4408.0,4457.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, first of all, the way it all ended and when it ended was stunning, not only for me but for many people, including many who had spent a lifetime studying the Soviet Union. Two years before it all came apart in '91, none of us would have predicted that timing. We knew that there were major changes, and the question was, how fundamentally could Gorbachev with his program transform the Soviet Union? And in this context of the Aspen Congressional series, I remember early in that, say in '86, '87 with the Republicans, or even with the Democrats, the question they would ask is, \"Is it in our interests for Gorbachev to succeed with Perestroika, with economic modernization, transformation and the like?\" And what I said to them was, it depends on what changes take place and what the nature of his success is. That is, if Russia in the course of this process, this evolution, becomes a partner that we can do business with, becomes less of the threat that it has been before as a result of this process, yes, then it's very much in our interest.\n\nBut their basic criteria was, \"Do we want the Soviet Union to succeed in any fashion?\" Now, when it all came apart, that was a surprise. And at that point the notion that the Soviet Union would be transformed by Perestroika, by Gorbachev, that all disappeared, Soviet Union came apart. So, then you had two kinds of concerns. The first concern was, \"Well, how destabilizing might the collapse of the Soviet Union be?\" First of all, around the issue of nuclear weapons, because they existed in three other of the republics, former Soviet republics that were now independent states. Secondly, there was a great deal of instability within Russia, and the question within the Soviet Union and all the republics, but particularly in the Russian Federation. And European countries, the United States were preparing for food shortages in the winters, and there would be emergency flights of food to Russia in order to avoid political instability.\n\nSo that was one of the issues, but then the other issue was well in the future. How do we deal with this world? At that point, I'm a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the Committee on International Security Studies. And that committee comes up with projects, proposes it to the committee, ends up with sponsorship from the American Academy for it. And I proposed a series of books that would look at the new relationship between the United States and Russia from the old perspective, that is, that we were going to end up with a Russia that would matter to us in one way or another, whether it was Russia as unstable or whether it was Russia that began to come back in whatever form, whether we liked it or we didn't, whatever the opportunities.\n\nAnd we ought to be studying it in those terms, as opposed to what was basically a foot at that point. Tom Friedman in his book The Earth Is Flat, and the notion that, \"Now the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the old Cold War threat that we had nuclear Armageddon, that's gone. The Soviet Union as a threat is gone. Russia, if it's a threat it's out of weakness, but that's secondary to the other stuff that we need to worry about these days.\" And the purpose of this project was to say, \"No, you've got to continue to think about Russia in this region.\" So the whole region. So we did six books, again, with a variety of authors on a number of subjects, trying to understand the complexity of what we would now face in a post-Soviet world with all of the pieces, the core of which would be Russia.\n\nAnd that was one part of my feeling as I was moving into this period. All of that took place from basically the collapse of the Soviet Union until I think we finished that project over four years or so. But simultaneously in the other context of track two diplomacy and the way in which I was thinking about it individually, and the way in which I wrote, was thinking about now what the possibilities of positive developments, a more constructive path in US-Soviet relations would be. And there was plenty of context for that because the Yeltsin administration, Yeltsin leadership, came to the United States in that first year, we signed a new agreement. You can go back and look at it. I wrote about it in this little book on Return to Cold War because I rehearsed the terms that both sides thought we were on, the Clinton administration and the Yeltsin leadership, that we were going to create a Euro-Atlantic security community of democracies from Vancouver to Vladivostok.\n\nThat was the language, not of ivory tower types like myself, that was the language of leadership during that period of time. So as an academic in track two, we were thinking about ways in which we could be part of it, the way in which we could parse it and provide greater depth for the individual things that they were thinking about. But the notion was positive momentum and that we were riding a potential wave during that period of time. But as I say, the other side of it for me was, this is still going to be a complex part of international relations. And don't assume that all of that part of the world is over for us and that Russia is no longer of any significance to us, we can more or less set it aside.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4457.0,4834.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nNow, the second question I had related to this is, how does that contextual understanding of those two parts that you talked about, how does that help folks now and I think in the future think about what's going on with Russia and Ukraine and the United States' position in that war?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4834.0,4855.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, I think what one wants to do is, for anybody who has a longer-term view or wants to develop a longer-term view is to do some history, your field. That is, try to understand what has happened since 1991. Why did things take the course they did over that period of time? Now, I argue in this book, Return to Cold War, that up until 2014 and the Ukrainian crisis the relationship had been up and down. There had been the early years that I've just been describing of great hope. The first point at which you began to dent it was when we got serious about enlarging NATO by 1994, 1995. And that began creating tensions. The language that Yeltsin and Clinton had used, even though they were still close, now had been damaged by this decision and that period of 1976 [96] forward. No, 2000. What period do we have here for ... NATO enlargement is …","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4855.0,4939.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nLate '90s?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4939.0,4941.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\nLate 1994, '95. So '96 with the final act and so on, all of that. But then if you're looking at this history, when you go forward you have sort of an effort to revive this process. It looks like an up and down like a sine graph, with a curve that goes up and then dips down below. And then after, as I say, NATO enlargement, there's an effort to put things back on track and we create what was called the permanent joint council, which was a forerunner to what later would be the NATO Russia council. But then the graph goes downhill again after Kosovo, the US intervention, as I say, Yeltsin's very angry, they withdraw from this PCJ, where they were in contact with the US and NATO partners.\nSo until 2014 the way I describe it is ups and downs. The axis of that sine graph is basically downward. It's a secular downward trend, if people were looking at what was happening. And the amplitudes when the graph went down were deeper than the amplitudes when it went up. And a historian looking back at this period I think can see that. So you understand that already leaders had failed to understand the risks they were running. They kept assuming that this sine graph would continue and that they would, after a downturn, without quite understanding what the underlying forces were that were driving the ups and downs, that they would be able to recover and somehow they'd be able to recover and somehow, they'd be able to somehow get on a path that would be more steady. I thought, I said in the book and I think that's been the issue all along, and again, for the student that's trying to think about, where do we go from now? For that period, 1991 to 2014, the question that I had in my mind, why couldn't the relationship get traction? Why did it end up looking like a sine graph with these ups and downs? And I try to provide an explanation for that.\n\nBut then you get to 2014, and my view is at that point, the efforts and the hopes that people had even often misinformed about what was possible, that's gone. The relationship in my view at that point goes off the rails. And even though you continue to have ongoing negotiations and efforts to maintain progress on things like arms control, in fact, they're not making progress on arms control, they're losing it, and everything about the Cold War characteristics in its early stages now apply. They didn't from 1991 to 2014. But the early stage characteristics with three major exceptions, which I lay out in the book, which allowed most people to say, \"No, it's not a new Cold War at that point.\" But the other characteristics were there and they applied, and that made this period from 2014 to now where we are in 2022 very difficult.\n\nYou only understand how we got to 2022, which is crucial if you're thinking about the really long run, because what Putin does, I mean, it helps you to understand how we might have found an alternative path to what we got, but not having found that alternative path, that would've required the two to do the dance together. My view was that in this book on the return to Cold War that at every stage we did the dance together.\n\nAt one point, you can say one party's more guilty by omission or commission than the other party in my view. Whereas a lot of analysis parenthetically is that by the time Putin comes to power, there's only one source of what's going wrong and that's Putin in Russia. And throughout this period of time, we have the white hats, he has the black hats. And if we'd recognized it earlier, we'd have been much firmer with him. That's the analysis of people like Anne Applebaum, outstanding analyst, outstanding writer, and certainly the dissidents who have left Russia like Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who's now been on the outside, and a number of analysts like Ed Lucas at The Economist and so on. They would argue, \"No, it wasn't a dance we did together. This was an onslaught that grew ever more intense, ever bolder, ever more dangerous on the part of this man Putin.\"\n\nNow if you see it the way I see it, then you get to a point where there was an alternative path that wasn't taken, and then you get to a fundamental break, because what Putin did on February 24th is something that no one expected. And even most of what I think are the sound thinkers on the Russian side, I think probably even almost certainly his foreign minister and most within his cabinet, other than those who were closest to him in his inner circle and within this man himself and in his own mind, certainly the analysts that I knew who weren't... They may have had some kind of association with leadership, didn't expect the decision, were appalled by the decision. And the decision really is a grotesque breaking of every pattern before. And so we are where we are now. And even that, my notion of the Cold War 2014 to 2022 no longer applies. For example, and this will be the last part of my answer to your question of somebody trying to think long run, the Biden administration came into this, what I regard as new Cold War, had no intention of doing another reset such as the Obama administration had done, you'll remember, when it first came in and it made real progress after the Georgian War. The Obama administration came in 2008 and there were a number of things on various fronts where we were working with the Russians, primarily with President Medvedev at that point, but we knew that Putin was still pulling strings. And then it had started to go, went downhill very fast, or went into off the rails in 2014.\n\nBut Biden comes into office and he makes it quite plain there's going to be no reset. We're not going to do what Obama thought he could do and hope that he was able to do. We're in a different relationship. They didn't want to call it a Cold War, but from my point of view, that's what it was. And so the Biden policy in 2021, when he is in, is it's a longstanding policy. It goes back to the Harmel Report, NATO in 1967, but it's basically a policy, it's a two-track policy of détente and deterrence. The Biden administration in his first speeches, his telephone conversation with Putin, the rest of it, the rest in the administration, Sullivan and Blinken laid it out, was we will hold Russia to account when they act in a way contrary to the interests of the United States or our allies. So there'll be pushback. That's the deterrent side of it.\n\nOn the other hand, where there is in our mutual interest the possibility of cooperation, we'll explore that. That'll be nuclear weapons, that'll be climate change. John Kerry set off for Moscow right away in order to sort of prove that we were back on the path that we had abandoned under the Trump administration. We were going to work together on climate change and the rest. Well, February 24th breaks all of that, shatters that strategy. The strategy now is as Lloyd Austin outlined it to weaken Russia in every way possible with the sanctions, with the isolation, with all the other things that we're doing. So as Austin said, \"Russia can never do again what it has done in Ukraine.\" But the objective right now is not two-track, the objective is one-track, weaken and isolate Russia. And even if that war, and I believe, even if the war in Ukraine ends in the next few months or in the next year, that policy's not going to change. The sanctions will remain in place. The isolation of Russia will remain in place. The reorientation of all ties, economic, political, and otherwise that is taking place now as the West by and large executes this policy will remain in place. Russia will have reoriented itself in international relations, and we will have now what is basically a posture of the enemy dealing with the enemy.\n\nSo now, you're a student who's trying to think long run. Okay. Now, where do we go with U.S. policy toward Russia? Needs to have all of this history in mind because there will be some lessons in it, but there are also going to be a lot of it that no longer can be replicated. We are now, at least in U.S.-Russia relations, and some people are beginning to argue, given the significance of what Russia has done in Ukraine, in a different international world itself.\n\nBut I certainly would argue that we're in a very different world for U.S.-Russian relations and will be for as far as I can see. And therefore, almost all of what we've been exploring in terms of my career is either going to be at best very secondary, if at all even feasible, or else utterly irrelevant and infeasible. So somewhere along the line, I mean, there's some track two that's still underway, but it's very stilted. It's very unproductive. It's very disconnected from anything that would have policy implications. Basically it's somewhat hapless because people are not sure of how even professionals that have been engaged in this, how you think at this point.\n\nThere is one level that I think is still important and your students should be aware of it, and we'll see where it goes by the time any student sees our conversation, a university consortium that has been organized, Columbia, Harvard on the U.S. side, Science Po and Oxford, St. Anthony's on the European side, and although it's now discontinued on the Russian side, two major Russian universities. The idea is to have modules where the students are together, at least represented of students from the six universities, an annual conference, and then through social media, various interactions. So as a part of their graduate programs in each of these institutions, they now were collaborating across the six institutions and having that experience, that will continue even though the Russian part has dropped out, the Russian institutions have dropped out and Russian students will no longer be participating, but the Western universities are going to continue collaborating. Their students will continue to interact in this fashion and senior Russians will be invited to be part of that.\n\nThe question will be in the longer run-in terms of training future generations will be two things. One, whether that continues and somehow resumes and therefore long-term generations who have a chance to come in and they will advance in their careers. So, 20 years down the way, down the road, who knows where things will be? They'll have had this kind of training as a result of the program I'm describing. But even if it remains among the four of the six universities that I've mentioned, as well as other universities that come to benefit from this kind of thing, they're all, graduate students now are trying to figure out how they think about the issues that we've just been talking about, instructors trying to work with them of how they think it through as they themselves are thinking it through, their own research, their own writing. If it is this quest for trying to think beyond the immediate issue, recognizing the fundamental change that I think has now been imposed on the problem, but nonetheless to both in the short run, try to understand things in their greater complexity, not simplify.\n\nAnd secondly, at some point to try to think longer run, that is, where do you go? One of my Russian counterparts, one of the people I most highly respect has been involved with a number of these programs is the son of the man I mentioned earlier, Georgy Arbatov, who's now deceased, head of the Institute for USA and Canada. His son is now one of the senior specialists, one of the other institutes. He'd been a Duma representative. But he's from my point of view, one of the most knowledgeable Russian specialists on international affairs as such, fair-minded, balanced and so on. And certainly, one of the most knowledgeable on nuclear weapons and been, in fact, a part of the Russian delegation on New START, has just sent me a piece that he wrote that published in April. He's not gained saying the war, he can't obviously weigh in on how he thinks about the war, what his judgment is about Putin's decision to go to war. But he's talking about first the impact of the war in Ukraine on arms control prospects, the U.S.-Russia bilateral effort to go beyond New START, use this five-year period of extension, and other arms control that affect the Europeans that have now been all thrown off-kilter.\n\nBut he's then thinking about what could happen, notwithstanding the fact that this relationship is going to be destroyed, is going to be fundamentally dysfunctional, but the two countries still will have nearly 90% of the nuclear weapons in a confrontational relationship where you would want to have new guardrails, where you'd want to be thinking about arms control. So he believes that even in this world, in U.S.-Russian fashion dystopian, from my point of view, that there could be, as there was after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the grounds for getting back to strategic nuclear arms control.\n\nSo he's trying to think long run as a Russian. I don't think that's out of question in a piece that I've written that may or may not be published where I'm thinking about two Cold Wars, if we move that direction to the Chinese. In the European context, my view is that however this war ends, I don't think it's going to end with an agreed settlement that is a negotiated ceasefire and then a peace agreement of some kind without a negotiated settlement with either Russia controlling a larger portion of the territory than they do now, and then absorbing it into Russia, or in some kind of a military stalemate that ends with a kind of Korean Warlike outcome with no peace, no armistice and the like. But at that point, you'll have NATO, which is now as you see from this recent summit and the new strategy, I wrote this before that, it was beefing up its arms at all levels, the reserve force and the rapid response force now renamed, and the quick response thing, the brigade, and it'll be forward deployed. And it'll be now along, I said it'll be with Finland and Sweden in NATO.\n\nSo the Finnish border is 830-mile border. NATO will be all along that border cheek by jowl with the Russians. And the Russians, although they have a depleted military, they nonetheless a very formidable military. It will be forward deployed along the three military districts that face NATO in that context. One would assume that common sense says, again in a confrontational context, you want to begin thinking about the guardrails that you've dismantled. A conventional forces treaty in Europe that controlled the kinds of equipment that you could have, armament you could have forward, and the number of forces that you could have forward deployed, a Vienna document that controlled the size of exercises that you ran and transparency and sharing information on it, the Open Skies Treaty, which allowed overflights to keep track of what was happening in terms of... All of that is down the drain at this point, practically.\n\nBut in this context, even if this relationship is fundamentally destroyed, why wouldn't you want to try to get back to that kind of thing? That's when you most need it, in these circumstances. Well, again, that's my way of trying to think ahead, but how one in fact relates to Russia at all other levels, especially Europe that's right next door and that has historically been dependent on Russia for energy to begin with, but that'll now be reoriented in fundamental ways or what the relationship will be with a country that was on the way to becoming the European Union's largest consumer market. Could it yet be at some point? Would some of that come back somewhere along the line, and what would be the implications of it? What if Europe, at some point, depending on how this phase of the war itself turns out, do the Europeans want to talk to the Europeans about Europe and the broader topography, political topography of Europe, including what European security is all about in this context?\n\nWe've had hints all along that the French President Macron believes that at some point we have to get back to talking about European security architecture and how Russia fits into that. In the meantime, Macron supports all of this pressure on it, but that opens the possibility for long-range thinking as well. So again, for students, again the question is, okay, you've got these pieces that Legvold has just laid out in the arms control side of security. But then you've got the larger question of, what should Europe look like? You're a historian. You know what Europe has looked like over the last 200 years and how much that security picture has changed over 200 years. You now have some sense that you've entered what is a historic breaking point in terms of the development of European security, but Russia isn't going to go away.\n\nRussia is where it is geographically. Western Europe is where it is geographically. And even though the pieces have adjusted their positions vis-a-vis one another, they haven't adjusted their fundamental physical relationship. So, in the long run, how does one think about European security architecture? Even if you grant, well, that depends on how the war turns out. Okay, fine. But allow your thinking to be both suspended and at the same time, try to push it forward.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=4941.0,6164.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nI have one, I think it's the last question. We'll see where we're at with it. But you have essentially this relationship of uncertainty and dysfunction, and yet I still have a... I hear a hint of optimism in your view of things. And it leads me to ask you the question, as an individual living through all this, how do you find or maintain a sense of satisfaction or purpose despite the very profound ups and downs of what you've dedicated your career towards understanding?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=6164.0,6205.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, there are no grounds for satisfaction and there are very profound grounds for disappointment. And even, although it is a position of arrogance for criticism of what could have been done that wasn't, because I'm somebody who does not believe in historical determinism. I don't even believe in the power of fundamental structural arguments in terms of political relationships, although I don't discount it. I believe in agency, I believe in choice primarily at the leadership level, but all of the elements that bear on leadership. So, at that level, I'm very critical of what, but as I say, we did the dance together. So, it's not a criticism that's leveled only in one direction. What gives me hope or at least allows me hope with fingers crossed is that somewhere along the line, leadership will understand that the trajectories we're on now, primarily in the relationship that I think is the central relationship, disruptive as Russia has been, is China.\n\nI'm hoping that both in Beijing and in Washington may be encouraged by other parties that have a stake this from Delhi to Tokyo to Brussels, that leaders will stop and think about the course they're on right now, because they're on a course, which is not Cold War, but they're doing a number of things that are leading in that direction, and that it'll stop before we get to that. Because if the U.S.-China relationship goes over the edge and into a new Cold War that's harsh where we really are dealing with one another as adversaries and the dominant phenomena will be military confrontation, and the economic side of it will be very secondary and very weak. In fact, that'll be even mobilized in a kind of economic warfare, elements of which you know are already there, from Trump's tariff war to all the things we're doing by trying to cut one another off with educational research, technology exchange and the like.\n\nIn that context, then it'll be very dangerous, and my fingers crossed as we don't get there, because then we will be back to a relationship where even if China isn't lockstep or Russia lockstep with China, they'll be very close. They'll both be adversaries and enemies of the United States and of the West in general. And we will be somewhere where we were in the original Cold War that finally led up to, although in a very different fashion, led up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And at that point, the world will be on the verge of that world's version of Berlin Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis and a lot of destructive interaction in a bipolar world. Although in this case, it'll be even more destructive because the interstices, economic, social and otherwise, they're so much more dense and elaborate than they were in the original Cold War.\n\nThere was a lot of autarky in that original Cold War with the Soviet Union and the international institutions at the time. But now, were so embedded and together in so many of these things that ruining those is going to be enormously disruptive along the way. It'll be very costly. The opportunity cost will be immense. So, my fingers are crossed that we won't go that way and that there's a possibly we won't go that way. In that context, destroyed U.S.-Russian relationships that is in deep Cold War may not have much else going for it than what I just described, Alexei Arbatov's hopes, my notion that common sense would say new European security architecture is probably not in the books, but maybe you can at least think about guardrails within that context on the military front.\n\nAnd maybe somehow the disorientation that's already being introduced. Take a look at your retirement, your 401k) as a result of what's happening to reorientations in term of energy, or if you had hopes that the sanctions are going to force Putin's hands and you read the newspaper today that India and China have gladly taken all that oil that Europe is planning not to take already taking off of Russia's hands. That means that oil is going to flow that direction in the future. The fact that it's flowing in that direction, Europe's not taking it, is driving that price up to $110 to $120 a barrel oil, which is contributing to the inflation that is damaging your 401k) right now. That kind of a problem will still be there in a ruined relationship as we figure out how we adjust to this disrupted U.S.-Russia relationship. But somehow, I hope that we can avoid Cuban Missile Crisis in that context. But fingers crossed, because we won't be able to avoid that kind of thing if the U.S.-China relationship goes wrong.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=6205.0,6533.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nThat's a lot to process.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=6533.0,6536.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, I'm going to let you go now. I wish you luck with the project and I apologize for some of the windy answers.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=6536.0,6544.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nNo, I think that's great. I appreciate it and I think future listeners will as well. Yeah, I think we should stop there just for the sake of-","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=6544.0,6555.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert Legvold\n\nWell, I have to stop because I've got people waiting for dinner.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=6555.0,6558.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001/transcript/39320/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Blake Scott\n\nOkay. That's equally valid on that point. Thank you for your time. I'm going to stop the recording right now.\n\nEWI Society Oral History Project\nCollege of Charleston�Page �PAGE�1� of �NUMPAGES�2���","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/77909/file/165001#t=6558.0,6566.688"}]}]}]}