00:00Joining me now is Cliff May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
00:04Cliff, thank you so much for joining me once again.
00:07Brittany, always good to see you.
00:09It is great to see you because you and I actually spoke last week before the much anticipated
00:14Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. Now we're speaking a few days later, and I want to get your reactions,
00:20not only that, but the meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky as well.
00:25But we will first start with the Putin-Trump summit. Usually these types of summits, as you said last
00:31week, are choreographed, but you said this is different. You thought Trump is the type of
00:34negotiator who wants to sit down with Putin, look him directly in the eye. Do you think, A, that
00:39happened, and B, how successful was that last week? Well, let's be honest. I think what President
00:47Trump went into the Alaska meeting saying he was going to get a ceasefire or he would leave unhappy.
00:54He didn't get a ceasefire, so I have to figure he didn't have a big smile on his face as he got
01:00back in Air Force One and returned to Washington. Putin convinced him. Putin essentially said,
01:06look, you don't want a ceasefire, okay? Ceasefires come and they go. It'll be messy. It's not going
01:12to work out. Let's go for a piece, a real big piece, comprehensive piece. I think we can do that.
01:18Why don't you support me on that? For whatever reason, Trump went along with that. I think it's
01:26going to be much more challenging than one might imagine. Just a couple of observations about Alaska
01:33that I think are important. Sergey Lavrov, who is the longtime foreign minister of Russia,
01:41he was wearing a shirt that in Cyrillic said USSR. I think he was sending a message either that the
01:48Cold War isn't really over or remember that when we had a Soviet Union, Ukraine was our possession.
01:55Now it's Russia. Ukraine should be our possession again. I think he was sending either or both messages.
02:02You know, it's also true that President Putin put flowers on the grave of Soviet servicemen who had
02:11died in Alaska. I think he was trying to say, we were friends once upon a time. We can be again.
02:17But we need to remember that the US became aligned with the Soviet Union only after Stalin signed a
02:26pact with Hitler. And then Hitler betrayed him. And two days after that betrayal, two days after the
02:31Nazi invasion of Russia, then Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, okay, we'll help Stalin defend his country.
02:40And the alliance lasted only until after Hitler's defeat, at which point what happened? Well, the
02:46Soviets took over and made satellites out of Eastern Europe. So, you know, that was not a great
02:54relationship. I think it's important to understand that.
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