Putinsim is not necessarily the end state for Russia. Russia has moved in many directions since the early 1980s.

It's said that Putin can't stand Hillary Clinton. I don't know that for a fact, but it certainly looks that way, but I think her approach to Russia stands up pretty well.

Republicans - Reagan but also George W. Bush - believed in freedom, and they believed in America's role. To have the governing party speak in terms of a zero-sum world, or speak in terms of America's purpose as no more than grabbing the largest share possible in the short run, goes against our foreign policy tradition that goes back to 1900, really.

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.

I think that President George W. Bush was ahead of most of his government, in realizing that Putin was not the person we thought he was.

For two generations up through the mid-1980s, many thought we were losing the Cold War, even in early 1989, few believed that Poland`s solidarity movement could win, that the Iron Curtain would come down, that the Baltic states could be free, that the second of the 20th century`s great evils, communism, could be vanquished without war, but it happened and the West`s great institutions, NATO and the E.U., grew to embrace 100 million liberated Europeans.

The sense the great democracies of the world - Europe, the United States, Japan, others - are going to set the agenda for the world. [Russians] want to bring that down.