ago before he passed stephen cohen was on this program, it was such a pleasure to have him on john mearsheimer was also on. and he was talking about the possibility of a world war, 3, a new killer conflict, nato against russia. and i kind of pushed back gently against that. when he said, peter, i am very, very serious. we're on that path prescient. at that, do you think one of the things that really bothers me, i mean, i remember the anti war movement in the 1980s. you know, intermediate metals all i'm ever that very well. ok. and it seems to me, look at the rhetoric, the, the very reckless rhetoric that comes out of the political class, particularly in the united states in the u. k. b, they're both the worst, the u. k. is the worst of the worst. actually. they don't seem to, they seem to have forgotten the, the terror that we had in the 1980 of a new killer war. you remember like threads and the day after and all that. i mean we were to verify, they don't seem to care. they seem to be immune to it. i mean, we even have members of congress say everything's all the table every day. you know, i

that case has been made most sharply by the university of chicago scholar john mearsheimer as well as many others over the years. as it happens when nato first started considering expansion, i was one of those advocating caution. while i was not entirely opposed to it, i argued that even as nato admitted poland, hungary, slovakia and the czech republic, it should also begin serious negotiations with russia to ensure that any further expansion was part of a stable security arrangement that took moscow's concerns into account. i think it's pretty clear that nato's 2008 bucharest declaration was a disaster. dangling nato membership in front of ukraine and georgia without actually setting them on a course to get it. it was enough to enrage putin, but not enough to actually protect those two countries. and yet as time has passed, i've wondered what europe would look like with no nato expansion. the reality is that the vast majority of the countries that were part of the soviet sphere and many that were in the soviet union itself, were utterly traumatized by that experience. it was an even