Partisanship is not part of my professional makeup.

The Russian myth that they broadcast to the world, and have their various surrogates in the West repeat, is that somehow the West took advantage of them, that we were mean to them. That writes out of history everything Strobe Talbott and Bill Clinton tried to do with Boris Yeltsin. Strobe Talbott leaned forward doing everything he could to help the Russians, and frankly, I have little patience for the notion that we gave them nothing but bad advice.

The West in its modern form since 1945 is a miracle, and that`s in our American interests. It`s its good that the West is strong and at peace, and we should want more of that, not less.

My 40 years in the foreign service and the careers of many of my friends became associated with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the putting in order of what came after - the building of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. It`s hard to recall today how improbable victory in the Cold War appeared.

The same people the Americans sent over - that we sent over to advise the Russians, we also sent over to advise the Poles about how to build a post-communist economy. Same people, same advice, with radically different results, which leads to suspicion it's not our advice which was the crucial variable. It was the Poles, on one hand, and the Russians on the other. The Poles succeeded; the Russians didn't. Don't blame us.

Remember, the American grand strategy works when other countries feel secure. But it doesn't work if we acquiesce in the aggression of other countries.

The Civil War was fought, in a sense, over whether that sentence - all men are created equal - is to be taken literally. And the southerners in the 1850s argued that it was not.