this is something that began under mikael gorbachev. a long time ago.not really amount to a great deal until around 2014. then you had this crisis between the west and russia ukraine. russia, very consciously, tried to pivot to china. they started negotiating to build a gas pipeline. it made perfect sense, but they had been negotiating for decades. they could not agree on price. and then there was the annexation of crimea. they could not come to an agreement with the chinese. from there, they were gradually building more pipelines. the russia in 2015 overtook saudi arabia. these are really big changes, geopolitical changes. once you build that pipeline, it takes a long time. this is true with both of the oil pipelines and the gas pipelines that it takes 30 years or more to build. jason: there has been some unintended consequences with president trump's economic relationships in the united states. carol: private exports -- bourbon, motorcycles, and maine lobsters has become retaliatory targets. >> trade wars do not happen in isolation. they happen in con

when you visited washington for president reagan's funeral, mikael gorbachev was asked if ronald reagan won the cold war. his reply was, that's not serious. the article in the washington post continued, the changes gorbachev brought to the soviet union were undertaken not because of foreign pressure, but because russia was dying under the weight of the stalinist system. just fell inion under the weight of its own rotten system and it would have done that if ronald reagan had never been born. how do you answer that? fmr. ag meese: just by looking at the facts. what would have happened if it ,ad not been for ronald reagan the united states having built up its strength and so on, the other things, the soviet union might have fallen on the weight of all of its wrongdoing, economic wrongdoing, military buildup, all that. it would have taken two, 3, 4 decades and may not have ever happened. one of the things the soviets would have done and gorbachev would have done if he followed his predecessors, as soon as there was armed resistance or popular uprising, he would have called in the troops an