so i'm the first occupant of the office at the undersec retare -- at the undersecretary level but i think we can expect many more. and my primary purpose is to get the thing started off right and set the proper tone for what we ought to be doing. so what ought we be doing and why? for that, i have to pull on a little bit of history, some of it recent, some of it of longer standing. i'm going to start by saying in the united states we've been on holiday for 25 years, maybe late -- a little bit more, since the fall of the berlin wall and shortly thereafter the collapse of the soviet union. at that time, china was not a great power. russia was devolving from great power status into a much more fractionated regime. we had not seen, putin had not risen to the top. at that time it would have been really unimaginable for someone to stand up and say that the dissolution of the soviet union was the greatest tragedy of the as putin has since stated. \[phone rings] i think that's for you. i'm sorry. i will just turn that off. figure out how to turn it off later. so we would not, in the early 1990's,