well let me say two things first to clarify why i use that language because i saw a number of things happen that i think the kremlin had a hand in everything from the attempted assassination of the double agent in britain to some of the support for the assad regime and its barrel bombing and artillery attacks on its own populations in syria and perhaps even issues like the now i'm soft killing in russia and the evidence that i have seen suggests complicity at the highest levels of the russian government in some of these tragedies which had a very human cost now i could be wrong but that's my working understanding and that's why i use strong words at the expense of the russian president however i also have written about how i think that vladimir putin is genuinely respected among russians because he did help stabilize the country after the yeltsin years he tried to restore a sense of stability growing prosperity international prestige and in my writings i've tried to argue that we need to understand the basis for president putin's

popularity even if we ourselves don't like him and that's the way i try to combat this now in diplomacy you're right you know what i've written on these pieces of paper as a scholar is one thing if i were somehow meeting with president putin which i don't expect to do but if if i were somehow asked to do that then i would try to be polite but i also want to raise human rights issues because that is fundamentally one of the divisive issues right now separating the united states from russia and by the way one last point i know that if lattimer putin were in this conversation he would point out that we americans sometimes feel a little bit holier than thou that we sometimes feel like we're the only country that's trying to be moral but we also we also make a lot of mistakes and some of them are from negligence or incompetence for example the poor way in which we prepared to stabilize iraq after the invasion of two thousand and three the poor way in which we prepared to stabilize libya after the overthrow. khadafi in two thousand and eleven the way in which we encourage the

syrian opposition to rise up against assad in two thousand and eleven but then didn't give them enough help so we just essentially condemned the country to a civil war and i would personally acknowledge that if president putin said these things to me or to us that he would have a certain amount of validity in those arguments so you know the criticisms can go in both directions certainly criticism could go in both directions but i think the extent of damage i simply don't understand how americans can even compare that because if you take the you do war in the racket they were in libya they were in syria the casualty is a measure of them hundreds of thousands whatever you don't like about russia's action in in its neighborhood or even in the middle east it never comes to. same point and yet the. political culture of it is very common to even deny russia's moral equivalence but the united states despite the fact that

democrats i'm sorry for being blunt killed far far more people around the world than russians have ever done don't you find this. rather contradictory and well you know i recognize the need for this debate because i hear what you're saying and some of it i agree with and all of it needs to be discussed now in syria from an american a standard american point of view which is not necessarily mine but a standard american point of view is that we rose up or we encouraged on protests protests or speech infiltrators from iraq reach killed a lot of people beheaded a lot of people suppressed rights people's rights to much larger extent that they local government you know come back to iraq but on syria the american interpretation is that we supported demonstrators and then they were mowed down by assad and then russia came in to help assad who already had a lot of blood on his. hence the russian view is that americans were naive because

by supporting the demonstrators they failed to foresee the most likely result and so even if the americans were not morally directly guilty of murder they wound up encouraging a process which had foreseeable consequences that were very bad now my view i'm not really here to debate you because what i've tried to do is to acknowledge that there are these two different narratives and they're both partially correct and i think we do need to revisit u.s. russia relations by listening to each other's narratives i'm critical of president putin yes but i also have said that we need to rethink the way in which nato has expanded into eastern europe and we need to try to negotiate a new security architecture with lattimer putin that would anticipate an end to nato expansion provided that putin would help resolve the ukraine and georgia crises and agree that all these countries can join the european union someday if they wish and if they're invited and if we can do that deal then we can sort of

restart u.s. russia relations eliminate the sanctions and go to a more stable period in our history that's the kind of dialogue that i want to have well mr herman we have to take a short break but we'll be back in just a few moments states in. the most expensive fish in a will each one selling for tens of thousands of euros it continues to grow its entire life if it was thirty years old you might have a two ton fish out there and yet they don't get that big today because we're way too good to catch it. it's only when the over much larger mission was once the that was much more widely distributed we have politicians that are in office for a few years if they get reelected everything is very very sure. our system is not

suited and is not cleared for long term survival and that's why we have to catastrophes. manufacture consent to public wealth. when the ruling classes protect themselves. with the find. the root sick.

welcome back to worlds apart with michael o'hanlon senior fellow at the brookings institution mr howland just before the break we were talking about the perceptions of the war in iraq and there is an opinion that the appointment of john bolton is a direct consequence of the united states failing to reckon with their legacy of the bush years treating dot's war as a blunder as a mistake rather than a crime that it was and we all know the john bolton that the tower was one of the loudest advocate. more he's still pushing. for preemptive strikes

against both iran and north korea how high is the danger in your view of history repeating itself in this administration well that is a question a lot of us are asking in washington right now as well because like i've said before in this conversation i don't think that president trump will automatically do what john bolton tells him to do and i think secretary of defense jim mattis will have a lot of influence still i hope that secretary of state incoming mike pompei o will be very thoughtful on some of these issues although as you know he's also very hardline especially on the iran question so i don't really know what president trump is going to decide but i agree with the way you put the question that a lot of us now have this concern because we have taken away one relatively more moderate voice that's you know a charming master who has lived through a lot of war who has fought a lot who knows the consequences of war who understands the limited options that we

sometimes have before us and we're replacing h.r. mcmaster with someone who's much more hardline and more ideological and in my opinion somewhat less experienced in the most important ways they can prepare somebody for this job so i'm a little bit more nervous myself but i'm not going to predict what president trumps decisions will be because again historically there are times where the national security advisor has not been the most influential or even one of the most influential advisers to a president where sometimes that person's role has been more about implementation and management and we'll have to see how this works out with john bolton now mr headland you've written a lot about the tensions between russia and the to the tensions that have lot in the past have only been in a new generation of weapons which at least according to the kremlin run the u.s. missile defense system in europe obsolete do you. i believe that to be the case and

if so do you thing russia is now in the position of negotiating peace through strength as ronald reagan these to put it first of all i think the united states and russia both need to find ways to stop wasting money on nuclear arms because we are so much above everyone else and also we have so much power against the other one neither side could ever disarm the other with a preemptive strike and the other side could use a missile defense system to prevent a retaliation by the other side so we have more than we need and i regret that we're both wasting more money on these systems than we need to in the united states we anticipate spending something like one point three trillion dollars on our nuclear modernization agenda over the next twenty to twenty five years i think that's more than we should be spending and part of the reason is we're returning to a little bit of an arms race dynamic with russia however on your broader point about peace through strength. i actually do share some of that hopeful vision and i'm glad to see russia in some ways be stronger under vladimir putin have more

self-confidence rebuild some elements of its military strength it causes me in certain actions that russia's carried out but i think a strong russia is good for the world it's good for the stability of eurasia to the extent that russia feels good about its own territorial coherence and protection that makes russia more confident actor and a more secure actor and so i'm in favor of that a couple of years ago a colleague of mine named cliff gatti he and i wrote an article in which we suggested that a future russia that the united states should aspire to would be something that we would call a reagan off russia so we took the were ronald reagan and added the russians suffix o. v. to imply that a peace through strength attitude on the part of russia where the army is is well treated and strengthen where the patriotism of the country is reinforced where the country feels that it's on its feet stable secure and prosperous this actually is

the kind of russia the united states should want and it's a more realistic aspiration than believing that russia is going to want to join the european union or you know become the new other lines or sweden i think russia is very different than a lot of european countries in its political outlook and its history but we can i think benefit from a strong russia that self-confident and at peace with its neighbors i'm not sure i agree with you about russia joining with europe i mean certainly russia is not going to be part of the european union but i think russia definitely sees itself as part of the european civilization with everything that in it entails including human rights the respect for the rule of law democratic institutions free and fair elections that cetera but coming back to that point of reagan of russia because i actually think that putin. may read a lot of. reagan thinking because he talks about that in his own way but he

centrally his main point is that the russia will only be respected when when it's strong it is only the strong russia that the west and the united states in particular could take seriously but the. letter question i'm not quite sure you said that this is the kind of pressure that the west should one but do you think this is the kind of pressure that the west can take yes i think it's our i think right now we're not there i mean right now i see a russia that's still struggling to figure out its role in the world and i think some of what vladimir putin has done is regrettable it's understandable but it's also regrettable and you know you have good criticisms of american foreign policy mistakes and i think a lot of your criticisms are important ones for us to hear and reflect on i also have criticisms of russian foreign policy i think russia's been too aggressive towards ukraine and syria for example and i'd like to see russia more confident to the point where that kind of issue is no longer as likely to occur that's part of

why i believe this new security architecture where russia doesn't feel like nato is continually moving east and yet at the same time russia acknowledges the rights of countries like ukraine enjoy georgia to join the european union some day i think that's the right sort of compromise that's the right vision for this zone of neutral countries in central and eastern europe and i think you know you mention the yes russia is a european country what i was trying to say before yes russia's european but it's also different it's distinct you can tell me if i'm wrong but i don't think that most russians and vision the european project the same way that some western europeans do where the nation state becomes weaker and less important over time especially five ten years ago a lot of west europeans thought the european union would ultimately become more important than the countries they lived in and there's been some pushback against that of course in britain and elsewhere. but that's still part of the european project in the minds of some west europeans i don't know too many russians who think that way i believe russians want to be part of europe but also want to be

their own entity the great power of you know eurasia and that the nation state is very important in the russian political consciousness and it's not getting weaker as history moves forward that's what i meant to say the russian i think is different from some parts of western europe even though it is also part of europe as you correctly point out i generally agree with you mr han let me try to squeeze in one more question about another reason appointing mr trump a oh we have spoken a lot about mr bolton but didn't have that much time to discuss human particularly he's currently be had of the cia and it's been reported in the russian media the cia and russia's f.s.b. the federal security service the successor of the k.g.b. montane quote unquote an active dialogue and an indirect proof of that would be everything meeting between russia's security and intelligence chiefs with their american counterparts in in washington it looks like compare has already been

acting in this squad that a diplomatic capacity even. as they have of the cia yeah you might be right about that i mean we've heard some of those discussions and some of those rumors and learned about some of those meetings to course i don't know the substance of the conversations but i think they may provide an entree into a broader conversation i believe the united states and russia are still going to have a lot of problems in our relationship for a while but we need to start having a broader dialogue about how we see our common future especially in regard to central and eastern europe and that has to be handled with a certain amount of separate you know conversation from the immediate policy agenda on syria ukraine election meddling human rights all the issues where we're still having a lot of disagreements and we will probably contin. i have disagreements but we've also got to look to have some kind of a broader historical understanding of how our countries are going to get along with

each other long term and so as pompei as the guy who can do that but i think it probably makes sense that he's going to be secretary of state that should allow him a more natural position from which to continue those conversations with russia well mr howland we have to leave it there but i really appreciate your being on the show today and to our viewers please keep the conversation going in our social media pages that's for me hope to see you again same place same time here on worlds apart .

there's praise for a single purpose. they have a superman. they start training very young. eight months of intensive school. rats. and they save lives. time about email but of the entire you might even want to get. them but not a lot of. cattle going to die i mean by my mind how many i know god those who were

welcoming and had to be. made into a move to india that didn't kill in the end just had the image is consistent if you want. to. know about the natural or good of the me i suppose you go to like the city to get a. patient is fulfilling a hopeful when it comes to cool boy you take the risk oh wow. if if if. if if if.

if from. in the stories that shaped the last seven days the diplomatic standoff over the poisoning of. his daughter escalates twenty three russian and british diplomats home moscow insists it did not target the former spy calling it terrorism against russian citizens. arrowheads a small town in southern france where a gunmen hijacked a car and took hostages in a supermarket four people died in the deadly attack including a police officer who the volunteer to enter the scene. in scandal. deleting campaign online reveals the data of millions of people from the social platform to be allegedly exploited in political campaigns also

ahead. protesters come out in force in response to the french president's proposed social and economic reforms and a nationwide strike which turned violent in the capital. and into the weekly r t international this sunday morning from moscow hello and welcome i'm going in only their top story the diplomatic standoff between the u.k. and russia escalated this week with twenty three diplomats from each country returning home london made the first expulsions following the poisoning of former double agent surrogate script his daughter in salt spray in southern england the investigation continues u.k. officials have repeatedly said that a russian link to the case was highly likely on thursday britain's prime minister

asked the e.u. to back theory. it was highly likely that russia was responsible this shows for one thing that the current analysis is already very well grounded and nobody questions that everyone was also indicate didn't do willingness to do follow as first russia's concerned. dr louche political landscape in europe towards russia and this is why it's not so easy to keep the. twenty eight to show the group. together. russian officials have repeatedly dismissed moscow's involvement and said they see the poisoning as an act of terrorism russia has also expressed willingness to cooperate with british authorities but so far that's gained little traction u.k. foreign minister boris johnson has been among the most outspoken against russian even using nazi comparisons and he wasn't alone. because the roads like to go.

up. putin's going to the white mountains thirty six. years i think the comparison with rocky thirty six is is certainly right moscow considers this kind of statements made under the level of the foreign secretary in you we unacceptable and totally irresponsible. the british government just free to make a decision about its budget situation in the world cup but nobody has the right to insult the russian people who defeated nazis and lost more than twenty five million people by comparing our country to nazi germany. did he goes beyond the common sense and we do not think british war veterans

including those of the arctic cold warriors would share this opinion. the russian embassy in the u.k. also posted this photo following the comments by boris johnson in a controversial moment the english football team was ordered by the british authorities to give a nazi salute before a friendly match with germany in one thousand thirty eight while some eight outlets boycotted the tournaments. and indeed the russian blame game has extended into areas once considered beyond political point scoring and the signature going to has more now on an educational project that partly reinforces the negative rhetoric that's being thrown at russia take a look. what's better than helping the young to try to maneuver the ever tricky world of global current affairs. of the day is an online news service that is used by one in three u.k. schools teachers my variance from subscribing schools user articles and activities across all subjects for lessons homework research. here's one handed to tory and

provided by the service to help educate the young and broaden their horizons talks of putin on mission to poison west ouch and among questions to discuss is putin europe's most dangerous leader since hitler was this guy. to help students out topics like the ongoing five scandals where an investigation is still underway are broken down despite this incriminating evidence of international outrage to release monks and everything in case there is confusion still there is a dictionary included which explains the meaning of the words marks surely this teaches you to put things into perspective not the chalk and blitzkrieg are also in here a military tactic designed to quash the enemy with overwhelming force a short space of time coincidentally made famous by hitler in world war two just to

make it a bit easier to connect the dots brutal assassinations cyber attacks as well as plotting the downfall of western democracy also laid out as food for thought a you decide section let students consider the following questions is putin the most dangerous man in the world did the cold war ever end as well as what impression does putin give about what russia is like the day helps students develop information literacy and critical thinking and prepares them for the challenges ahead in the ever changing world critical thinking is key the toxic putin class is dismissed and associate churkin our party wanted course there's been lots of reaction to this including from russian presidential spokesman dmitri peskov who spoke exclusively to sophie shevardnadze about the script case. first we have to remember and the starting point is the words of president putin

that russia has nothing to do with this accident. the first blaming. came from politicians just a couple of hours after the accident and now we're see we see words of experts and experts of organization for four or four. p.c. w. . that say that the preliminary examining of this agent will take about three weeks is it contradictory yes it is. to france were four people were killed in the south of the country when a gunman hijacked a car and took hostages out a supermarket in a small town on friday the attacker pledged allegiance to islamic state before he

was shot dead by special forces. the movie i went shopping with my wife and sister in law after some time we had an explosion well several. i saw a man lying on the floor and another person who was very agitated with a handgun in one hand and a knife in the other and yelling allahu akbar. after that i took my wife and my sister in law and some customers nearby and were going to look for shelter i put them in a butcher's fridge closed from the inside. because

it's peaceful here where you see the like any out there he was very kind very sociable adorable he overheard sweets to the children and he is a terrorist. the terrorist has been identified he was killed during his solo and investigation will have to answer some important questions when and how was he radicalized and how and when did he procure the weapon. we have for several years paid with our blood to know the terrorist menace. among those who lost their life was a hero police officer who swap places with a female hostage he managed to leave a mobile phone for the authorities to listen in when police heard gunshots the move to neutralize the attacker lieutenant colonel or no beltran been fighting for his life but passed away on saturday morning. when over the past year alone there have

been repeated terror attacks on thwarted attempts in france in february twenty seventh attempted to enter the louvre museum in paris with a machete while an attacker was stopped at orly earp court one month after about a police officer was shot dead in april on the seans elisei then in october two young women were stabbed to death at a real we're station in marci former british intelligence officer sees the fact that the gunman was on the police surveillance exposes a failure in law enforcement. is part of the past that we're seeing emerging across europe over the last few years of people carrying out these low tech type of attacks with high. rates who are of course on the radar of at least the police if not indeed of the intelligence agencies but for some reason they're not being watched carefully enough they're not being monitored carefully enough they were being followed around. and there are.