Originally recorded on July 17, 2018.

William J. Burns recounts world-historic diplomatic events that helped shape where we are today. He discusses the Cold War being a “plastic moment,” the eventual fall of the Soviet Union and current relations with Russia.

Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year diplomatic career. CEIP is the oldest international affairs think tank in the United States.

“The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, 1990s; we saw a moment in which the United States was the singular, dominant player in the international landscape, not just with the end of the Cold War, but then with the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Burns says.

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