A nation must think before it acts.
Recently, I brought Peter Conradi’s “Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War” to a dialogue between American, European, and Russian experts convened at the Kozmetsky Center at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.
This book could have served as the script of our conversations—the bill of particulars from Russian participants on all the alleged and actual Western slights, mistakes, and betrayals; Western concerns over troubling Russian domestic and international behavior; the different assessments of what “partnership” should look like; whether Russia should take its place within the structures of the Euro-Atlantic world (and what leadership role it ought to play) or needs to strike out on its own as an independent pole of power in the international system; whether Russia even qualifies as a great power and global player or needs to accept a diminished role in world events; the re-litigation of the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
or readers and interested parties who cannot attend such conclaves of specialists, Who Lost Russia? is a concise, accessible, and focused narrative of the tangled, complicated, and ultimately unfulfilled relationship between Russia and the West over the past 25 years. Conradi makes sure to present a wide array of Russian, European, and American voices—policymakers and politicians, statesmen, experts and analysts—and lets them speak. The foreign editor of the Sunday Times, Conradi is less interested in dazzling the reader with his own expertise and opinions (although he is not a passive relater of the events he chronicles), and instead crafted a book resting on the principle of he reports, and you, the reader, adjudicate.