This will get us into a huge debate, so let me trot out my territory on this one.
I believe that the Russian position.... After the Cold War, we were not all that nice to the vanquished. Yes, the west won the Cold War, but this is the classic case of how to deal with your opponent when you defeat your opponent.
We sort of ignored them. We sort of pushed them around. We did the Kosovo bombing. We ignored them. That's why Putin went to the Munich conference in 2007 and said they'd had enough.
Could we have done something so that he wouldn't have had to do that? Could we have engaged the Russians more and not sort of pushed them aside? I don't think we did this malevolently; we just sort of thought that they weren't big players anymore, so we could do it our own way. We just sort of ignored them.
That, I think, was a big mistake. That has come to roost now. By deploying the troops they have—130,000 or whatever on the Ukrainian border—the Russians are demonstrating that they count. They're saying, “Please talk to us.” Now they've got everyone's attention. Everyone is talking to them.