Stephen P. Friott is judge in the senior district in the U.S. District Court in Oklahoma.

He is also an associate of the Romanov Center for Russian Studies at the

University of Oklahoma. His new book is Containing History, How Cold War History Explains U.S.-Russia

Relations. Welcome, Judge Friott. Thank you, Mark. It is an honor and a pleasure to be with you.

Right off the bat, the Soviet Union ended 32 years ago, officially.

People assumed that this would make the world a safer place.

But you note that it's almost a paradoxical, but the two ideologies competing for

world dominance during the Cold War actually ensured that certain rules and expectations were

in place and fairly reliable, making actually certain, they had certain

safety valves that everyone understood. Is that correct? That's a fair summary. Our,

the East-West relationship now is much less governed by anything you could possibly

call a real ideology, at least on the Russian side.

But during the Soviet era, and more specifically during the Cold War, yes, it's fair to

call it rules of engagement.

And the former Assistant Secretary of State Eagleberger used that very term, I believe.

And that really did amount to some guardrails in terms of keeping either side from falling off into the abyss.

And as we all know, beginning with the nuclear age, the abyss was indeed an abyss,

in every sense of that word.

And so you can think back to the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Berlin Crisis or Hungary or Czechoslovakia,

any of those real pivotal events during the Cold War.

And you can quickly piece together a picture that shows that, yes, there was some restraint on both sides,

and to a large extent ideology was in the mix as a restraining factor. Now we have, in my view,

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