Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed Bedrossian: We have a very exciting guest for you today on Conversations on Groong. Dr. Jack Matlock, the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991 during the time of the USSR’s collapse is with us.
Ambassador Matlock was instrumental in constructing U.S. diplomacy under President Ronald Reagan towards Gorbachev’s USSR. We’re going to discuss If the dissolution of the Soviet Union created a moment in geopolitics that was missed by the West and the United States to bring Russia into the fold of the Western security architecture. We’ll also talk about Ambassador Matlock’s memories of Soviet Armenia because he was there during Khrushchev’s Thaw in the 1960s as well as in the 1980s. So, having said that, before we go on, Please go to podcasts.groong.org slash donate and help us continue with this project.
Hovik Manucharyan: I can’t wait to go into this conversation, folks, but also one quick reminder, please make sure you’re subscribed, especially if you like the topic of geopolitics in the South Caucasus. We’re the only English language independent podcast on this topic. I think I would not be exaggerating if I said that, but at least I think of our podcast that way. Anyway, thank you for listening and watching and on with the show.
Asbed Bedrossian: Ambassador Matlock, welcome to The Groong Podcast. We are honored to have you with us.
Jack Matlock: Glad to be with you and thanks for the invitation.
Hovik Manucharyan: Ambassador, it’s an honor and a pleasure to have you.
Hovik Manucharyan: Since this is the first time that you’re on our podcast, we know that you had a number of tours of duty in the USSR. So we wanted to ask about your encounters specifically as they relate to Armenia during those tours. Can you tell us some of those maybe interesting anecdotes or stories throughout your experience?
Jack Matlock: Yes, I have very vivid memories. It happened that I was in Yerevan the day we got news that the Berlin Wall was coming down. So this was at a very crucial time. And this was a trip where I had gone to Tbilisi, then Yerevan, and then to Baku.
And at the time, the hot issue there was Nagorno-Karabakh . And there had been the terrible events, first in Azerbaijan, and then Other events and then the terrible pogrom against the Armenians in Baku and there were being active demonstrations in both cities and at the time the The Armenian general secretary was Harutyunyan, and actually his son was demonstrating over Nagorno-Karabakh. Just a few days later, when I came to Baku, the party secretary there was Vezirov, actually a former Soviet ambassador, I think, to India. I would say both of those general secretaries were very disturbed about the situation.
They felt it had gotten out of control. And what had happened before was after that first pogrom in Sumgait, the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh had Peacefully but forcefully forced the Azerbaijanis out. Actually, they were very proud of what they were doing. They notified the officer at our embassy that Covered the Caucasus, said, come and witness this.
And what they did, they gave the Azerbaijanis sort of 24 hours and said, and brought up troops to the border and take what you can, and they deported them. Well, Vezirov told me at the time that that was really what caused the much more serious pogrom. In Baku, that it was precisely those Azerbaijanis who were expelled, had no place to go, they had no housing for them, and they were the ones that had led the pogrom in Baku. So we seem to have a situation, and I would say both Harutyunyan and Vezirov said, this is a problem we cannot solve.
Moscow has to solve it. And of course there was an effort to send a senior official from Moscow to try to work it out. But I found the situation just absolutely tragic because I would say both sides had grievances and But it was clear that it was something that if you tried to solve it with violence, it was simply going to bring on more violence. Now, of course, you know what happened later after independence.
Again, Armenia was able to Create a corridor to Nagorno-Karabakh. And then, of course, later, the Azerbaijanis were behind it. Now, I’ve not been able to follow the politics since then. All I can say is that Now I think that Armenia and all the neighbors need peace.
And with all the other violence in the world, we really have to find a way to, I would say, continue the present relative lack of violence and find ways to make it more permanent.
Hovik Manucharyan: I also recall from one of your earlier speeches, I believe you also were in Yerevan In the 1960s, when the Statue of Stalin came down from Victory Park. What can you tell us about that incident?
Jack Matlock: Absolutely, yes. My first trip to Yerevan was during my first tour there, and it happened. I was accompanying an American senator, Senator Ellender, who was trying to Visit each of the Soviet republics and witness the agriculture, the industry, and so on. He was generally interested in what was going on.
Well, when we flew to Caucasus, we stopped first in the airport in In Stalingrad, a city named Stalingrad, and then we went to Tbilisi first, and then to Yerevan. We stayed at a hotel which was facing a very wide avenue. At the end of the avenue was a huge statue of Stalin. The next morning when we got up, that statue was not there.
It was during Khrushchev’s final criticism of Stalin at the Party Congress, the time that he publicized it. And of course, when we Flew back to Moscow. Later, there was no longer Stalingrad. It was renamed Volgograd.
But I remember how dramatic it was to see that huge statue before we went to bed and the next morning looking out wasn’t there.
Hovik Manucharyan: Wow. Yeah. So you witnessed very key important events, I think, that we cover frequently on our podcast. Thank you for that.
Asbed Bedrossian: Yeah, those are very interesting recollections of a time 60, 65 years ago. That’s amazing. Ambassador,
Asbed Bedrossian: in your 1995 book, Autopsy on an Empire, you argue that the Soviet Union collapsed mainly from internal weaknesses, not American pressure. Economic decline, weakening Communist Party authority, Gorbachev’s reforms and rising national movements all eroded Moscow’s control. And critically, at some point, Russia itself eventually stopped supporting the Union. And in your 2004 book, Reagan and Gorbachev, you make a related distinction.
The Cold War ended before the Soviet Union collapsed through negotiations between Reagan and Gorbachev, not through the military defeat of the USSR. So why did Russia itself ultimately turn against preserving the Soviet Union? Was it primarily because Russians believed They were carrying too much of the economic burden for the other republics, or were political and national factors more important?
Jack Matlock: I think there were a number of factors involved there, but to make the point as far as Whether it was, say, a defeat caused by Western pressure, I think that is not true, although many people feel it today. The thing is that we had ended the Cold War before the Soviet Union broke up, and therefore there was no pressure from the outside. If the Cold War had continued, the Soviet Union probably would not have broken up. And the second point is that it was not part of U.S. policy or NATO policy to break up the Soviet Union.
Our policy had been that what we were opposed to was the Soviet Union imposing on other countries its system. And I think President Reagan’s attitude was, well, communism is a bad system, but if that’s what the Soviet peoples want, that’s their business. What we object to is subjecting it to other people. So when Gorbachev voluntarily, I’d say, withdrew support for the communist leaders in Eastern Europe and allowed the I would say elections to go forward and the communist governments to fall that told us that they were no longer pressing it outside.
We certainly wanted the three Baltic countries to become independent. We had never recognized that they were legitimately part of the Soviet Union. They had been included Because it was a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact before World War II. And I would also note that one of the last official acts of the Soviet Union was to recognize their freedom so that the freedom of the Baltic states was separate from the later collapse.
Now, why did we not want to see a collapse? One thing, we worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For a while, there were nuclear weapons in many of the republics. As it turned out, they had been concentrated in just four republics at the time of the breakup.
Now, what was the motivation? I think we need to remember now when people say things like Russia is always imperial and it’s Russia’s fault. It was the elected leader of the Russian Republic that led the breakup. And there were a number of motivations there, but I think one of the primary motivations on Yeltsin’s part was to get back at Gorbachev.
You know, we have to remember, particularly those of us who study international relations and speak of theories and obsessions, That countries are led by people and the individuals and it makes a big difference. And I think that was one of the problems. But the main thing is we did not want to see it happen at the time. And of course, President Bush made that clear in a speech to the Ukrainian , the Supreme Soviet.
After his visit to Moscow, he came to Kiev and advised the other republics to join Gorbachev’s voluntary union. Assuming that it would be more democratic and voluntary. And he also condemned what he called suicidal nationalism. Now, at that time, he was not talking about Ukraine, but was talking about Georgia under Gamsakhurdia, who had already started attacking Minorities in Georgia.
And so it seemed to him that you really did need, you might say, a central but democratic government that would be able to allow the various nationalities to express freely their own national identity, but at the same time Not fight among them or suppress their own minorities. But, you know, later it was called his Chicken Kiev speech. But the fact was that that was sincere. I was on the plane with him flying to Kiev, Kiev in Russian, Kyiv in Ukrainian.
He put some of those things in personally in the speech as he was editing it. And so it was something I think he felt very strongly. And looking back, the thing is that many people looked at the collapse of the Soviet Union as something forced by the West and, you might say, resisted by Russia. Actually, the breakup occurred with the leadership of the Russian leader and against the advice of the West or certainly of the United States.
Asbed Bedrossian: Ambassador, as you mentioned, we had a number of problems rising in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, but it sounds like Moscow really had started dismantling the kind of central power it used to have in order to stop some of these things. Was the dissolution of the USSR actually inevitable at the point when Gorbachev started removing these coercive powers from Moscow?
Jack Matlock: Yes. Yes. I think it is one of the remarkable developments in history that it was Gorbachev, the head of the Communist Party, that took the Communist Party out of full control. Of the Soviet Union and he did it because he became, I would think, a true supporter of democratic processes.
However, the problem was that As he would say privately, and he told me this more than once, particularly after the Soviet Union had collapsed, I continued to interview him for my books, and he said, you know, this is a country that has always been ruled top-down, but when we look at the world, we see that these successful countries Therefore, I have to reverse Russian history." But then he said, it can’t be done overnight because our people have no real experience and it’s going to have to be step by step.
And I told him in one of my interviews, this was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I was actually Interviewing him for my book, Reagan and Gorbachev, How the Cold War Ended, I said, you know, one of the points I’m going to make is that it took you and Reagan specifically to end the Cold War because you had to have a Soviet leader willing to change the ideology. Which was inherently hostile to the West. And you had to have an American president who politically could lead a solution to some of the problems. And so it took both of you.
And he said, I think you’re absolutely right. And then I said, I’m going to say that it was you. Who took the Communist Party out of control of the Soviet Union. And I know he sort of slapped me on the back and said, Jack, you’re absolutely right.
And he said, you know, that was a system that could not be changed bottom up. It could only be changed up, down. And by God, I did it.
Asbed Bedrossian: That’s kind of an amazing story, actually, because I also don’t think that that kind of diplomacy works these days. Things are so polarized in the geopolitical world that I just don’t see, let’s say, Russia and the West working with the same kind of looking for the commonalities to work their issues out. Since the end of the Cold War, I’m afraid that
Jack Matlock: Our countries have forgotten diplomacy. They’re using force. They’re publicly airing their differences. They’re insulting each other personally and publicly.
That’s not diplomacy. And when we look back and see how President Putin of Russia has been demonized publicly by our leaders. I am not endorsing anything that he has done. But that is not the way to get along with somebody else.
President Reagan condemned communism. And at one point, you know, he spoke of it as the center of evil in the world or something like that. But he never publicly insulted the Soviet leader. I was present when President Reagan met Andrei Gromyko, then the Soviet foreign minister, visited Washington and met him, I remember when they shook hands.
Reagan’s words were, we hold the peaceful world in our hands. We must be responsible. And then he gave him a treatment almost like a chief of state. He was foreign minister.
Also, I would say that Reagan was very sensitive to the importance of World War II. To the Soviet leaders and now the Russian leaders. And much of his correspondence, I drafted a lot of it when I was working for him, his correspondence with the Soviet leaders, he would always add in his handwriting, sort of a P.S., how We understood the great sacrifices they had made to end World War II. Now I see how recently the Westerners have Have not included the Russian leader in many of these and have begun to insult him publicly.
That’s, I think, not the way to deal. I think our countries and our leaders are not elected to, say, give grades or assessments of foreign leaders. That’s not their job. Their job is to protect the interests of their own countries.
And I think that many of the things we’ve done since the end of the Cold War and particularly using our economic advantages to sanction other countries for something they have done internally and yet And that, of course, is a direct violation of the sovereignty under normal international law. And then, unfortunately, my country has also conducted aggression Without proper cause, particularly when we invaded Iraq, claiming they had nuclear weapons when there was no evidence they did, and in fact they didn’t. And yet, when Russia does the same, which of course is bad, But we make them look as if they are the only ones.
So I think this is quite tragic and is bringing us to a situation that is very dangerous for the entire world.
Asbed Bedrossian: Ambassador, in your 2010 book, Superpower Illusions, you argued that the U.S. misremembered the end of the Cold War. And this led to a situation where a narrative about defeating Russia, winning the war came about. I have a couple of questions about how life proceeded under Clinton and then Bush. You were closely involved in the diplomacy surrounding the German reunification.
This is 1989. And Secretary Baker said, not one inch eastward. But then it came about that he had really meant this. For only East Germany.
And we wanted to ask you about this in the context of NATO’s expansion, eventual expansion to the East. The question is, was there Was there an alternative to NATO’s expansion to the borders of Russia, essentially?
Jack Matlock: There certainly was, and I know that has been much disputed, and I’ll describe how it came about because I was present when those things were said. But let me say that whether or not it was a promise, it was a bad idea to expand.
So the question is not Whether there was a promise or not, I would say there was, and particularly in the context of earlier agreements, Because when President Bush and Gorbachev met in Malta in December of 1989, they had an agreement which they did put in writing, and that is that the Soviet Union would not use force in Eastern Europe to prevent political change, and that the United States would not, quote, take advantage of that. So, Gorbachev did permit and even encourage the democratic changes in Eastern Europe. And this, of course, It created real problems for him politically at home, but he did.
And then when Secretary Baker came to Moscow in February from December of that year, it was clear that once the wall was down that the East Germans were going to insist upon Being reunited with Western Germany. And so the only question was how to bring that about. It happened that because of the wartime treaties that the Soviet Union, United States, Britain and France all had sort of a legal Requirement to agree to this.
When Secretary Baker came to Moscow that February, he first came by Bonn, which was then the West German capital, and he had talked to the Foreign Minister Genscher whose idea was, look, We can assure him that there will be no expansion of NATO. We have no need to expand it into East Germany. So what Baker said, and I call this almost Almost literally, because I heard it several times. I was not in the private meeting when he first did, but as we were driving back to our embassy in Moscow, he told me what he had said.
And when he got there, he said the same thing to our delegation. And then in a subsequent meeting with Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, which I also attended, He said it again, and it was something like this. Assuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction, not one inch, wouldn’t it be better for the Soviet Union to have NATO preserved? The implication, as he continued, was we want to make sure That Germany doesn’t go nuclear again.
And he added that without preservation of NATO, there would be no legal basis for American forces in Europe. And that he thought that it was in the interest of Europe to have American forces there The implication, obviously, is to keep the Germans under control. He didn’t say that specifically. Gorbachev’s answer was, well, of course, the expansion of NATO is unacceptable.
But I understand what you are saying. And he said, I want you to know that although it had been our policy for a long time to try to exclude you from Europe militarily, I understand that your presence here can have a stabilizing effect and we are no longer trying to exclude you from Europe militarily. He did add, I’m not sure you need 300,000 troops here, but I’m no longer trying to exclude you. Then Baker repeated this to me in the car as we were driving, as I said, and I heard him three times say that.
Now when he returned to To Washington, the lawyers said, look, you can’t do that. If East Germany is part of Germany, you can’t really exclude part from the treaty. But what they did when they negotiated the Two Plus Four Treaty later, the provision was made that The territory of the GDR, there could be no deployment of foreign troops, that is non-German troops, and no deployment of nuclear weapons. So it made the condition, if there is an expansion of NATO, no basis.
And later when they began to talk during the Clinton administration, about the expansion of NATO. I know I was told by the then Russian ambassador in Washington, Yuri Vorontsov, who I knew very well, we had negotiated with him when he was deputy foreign minister and had a long time, and he said, look, it’s not the Article V guarantees that worries us. It is bases. Just don’t put any bases there.
And of course, later when they began to expand into Eastern Europe, I would say, first of all, I testified to the Senate when this was being discussed. Very much against NATO expansion. And I said that if it starts and is continued, that it could bring about the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the Cold War. Later, of course, I think we need to remember that the Russia did not oppose, though it did not really approve, the initial expansion, and even the later expansion into the three Baltic countries were not actively opposed by Russia.
It happened that when I was teaching at Columbia University in New York, President Putin was invited to give a lecture there. And I asked him after his lecture what his position was on the inclusion of the three Baltic countries in NATO. And he said, I’m paraphrasing, but He said, well, he didn’t think that was necessary, but at the same time, he wouldn’t oppose it so long as there were no bases. Well, I think that for him, the most important thing later was that We started putting bases in Poland and Romania.
These were anti-ballistic missile bases, but what was not publicized was the weapons used with a change of software. It could have been used offensively. They had been designed that originally for the Navy, and it could be used both offensively and defensively. This was something that I think President Putin objected to.
Very directly, and that was one of the important things. And then, of course, the expansion into either Belarus or Ukraine, or for that matter Georgia, would have been absolutely anathema to him, as he made clear. And yet, even at a time when By polls, two-thirds of the Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO. In 2008, during the second Bush administration, they pushed through a resolution in NATO that Georgia and Ukraine would someday be members.
Now, that was at a time when both Germany and France opposed this, and yet we sort of insisted upon it. And I think we have to recognize that we were warned repeatedly not to do that. I would also say that not only Does President Putin, is he convinced that the U.S. and the EU were behind the coup in Ukraine in 2014 that removed an elected president? And I think that there are good reasons for him to believe that.
And I would have to say, what would the United States have done if some foreign country, even one that was fairly friendly, had brought Mexico or Canada or even a smaller one like Cuba into a military alliance without us? I was in Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis earlier. And I saw how the United States would have reacted. Fortunately then, both of our leaders backed away from the nuclear weapons.
But I think now We are in a very hazardous time giving these things. This is very complicated in many ways, except the bottom line is that by expanding NATO, into areas that historically had been part of Russia and that I think was both unnecessary and unwise. And nothing justifies war and the suffering that is going on. I certainly could not approve it, but nothing justified the American attack on Iraq and our current war, which I think is totally illegal.
Asbed Bedrossian: By the current war, you mean Iran at this time?
Jack Matlock: Iran. So I think it is tragic that we don’t seem to understand that There is no such thing, I would say, as unipolarity, as one would say.
Hovik Manucharyan: Yes.
Hovik Manucharyan: Ambassador Matlock, I’d like to bring us back to the South Caucasus, if I may. While preparing for this interview, we came across your remarks that you made in Yerevan, or to an audience in Yerevan. This was about nine years ago in 2017. That was one year after the 2016 war.
It was a four-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which was pretty severe, but the regional status quo remained intact. When you were at that time asked whether regional powers had an interest in resolving the conflict, You indicated that there was little evidence of that, or at least that’s how I interpreted your answer. And you suggested that Moscow would tend to favor Armenia as long as Azerbaijan remained hostile towards Russia. But you also warned that Russia might tolerate or even encourage subtle tensions in the region as a way of preserving leverage.
Now, a decade later, Armenia lost the war in 2020, and in 2023, the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh was ethnically cleansed. Azerbaijan has emerged stronger and is today aspiring to be a regional middle power. Armenia, meanwhile, has moved much further away from its former security dependence on Russia. So now looking back at your assessment in 2017, do you see the outcome of the last five or six years as a major setback for Russia in the South Caucasus?
And if so, what did Moscow misunderstand or mishandle?
Jack Matlock: You know, I’m not now close enough to the situation to have any particular insights. I don’t want to pretend I do. All I can say is that I think as far as countries like Armenia and its neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan are concerned in today’s world, they really have to do their best to have at least decent relations with all their neighbors. And not to somehow, I think they have to take sides in some, say, East-West struggle or something like that.
I think that would be very dangerous. And I understand enough of the history to know how difficult that is. But somehow a way has to be found to put some of the atrocities of the past Behind us and think about the way we cooperate in the future. And I think particularly since I think all of the people, and this is particularly true of the South Caucasus, there are so many ancient cultures and so on, and so many things that maybe historically divide.
But in today’s age, We really have to find a way to cooperate peacefully. And I think, for example, Armenia really needs to continue to have decent relations with Iran. And of course, it would be better or good if somehow Armenia and Turkey could somehow Put the atrocities of the past behind them because I think the current world is really verging many disasters because we are not facing up to the broader problems, problems like environmental degradation that’s going to require the Cooperation of everybody. And even without wars, we’re going to be faced with great movements of people because of the effect of global warming and other things.
So mankind really has to decide how we face cooperatively these issues. And if we keep fighting over old scores and things, it’s going to make that indefinite and particularly for the smaller countries. So I’m not in a position really to judge movements that have happened recently. I am very pleased that Armenia is I’m now at peace with Azerbaijan.
And I do think that an aspiration, for example, to be a member of NATO, which maybe is more prominent in Georgia than in Armenia, but I think that is not the solution. And I think the idea that Armenia should join others in somehow boycotting Russia I think it makes no sense in Armenia’s interest, but I know that sitting at a distance, even though it’s an area that I love so much, but sitting at a distance, I really can’t go further.
Hovik Manucharyan: No worries. But I do want to ask you a question about the region in the context of rivalry between the West and Russia, because that speech that you gave was almost a decade ago. And two years after that, RAND Corporation published a paper called Extending Russia, Competing from Advantageous Ground. It was a U.S.
Army-sponsored study. And one of the points of that study was that the U.S. could exploit tensions in the South Caucasus in order to create problems for Russia in its periphery. Now, to me, at the minimum, it shows that by 2019, the South Caucasus was being viewed as part of the wider strategic competition with Russia. Now, we all understand the importance of peace and the need to have peace, but do you believe that peace can be achieved without cooperation?
Or let me just rephrase it with active competition and even enmity between the West and Russia. And how important do you think was the breakdown of the relations between Russia and the West after 2014? In changing the geopolitical environment around Armenia and Azerbaijan?
Jack Matlock: I think it is most unfortunate and dangerous the way the idea has developed that West and Russia are somehow locked in a civilizational struggle. I think that misstates it totally. And I think that the whole idea To write Russia out of, you might say, Western civilization makes no sense and it’s dangerous. Of course, our cultures differ in some respects, but Russia has, I would say since about the 18th century, has been very much a part of Europe.
And the idea that somehow these sorts of differences are huge civilizational differences, I think is really absurd. There’s really more difference between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean than there is historically between Russia and the other East European countries and Western Europe. So I think this whole civilizational argument has gotten totally out of hand and really has no historical basis. But I do understand how How strong emotions can be given the past.
But it does seem to me that this hyper interpretation of Russia’s differences do not serve our interests and certainly don’t serve the interests of peace. I think we have to remember that as terrible as many of the things that President Putin has done, we have given him examples for every one of them if we really step back and try to be objective. After all, NATO made war against Serbia when Serbia had not threatened any NATO nation. And we bombed them, we made war, and then we recognized the independence of Kosovo without the approval of Serbia in violation of one of our basic agreements that brought the Cold War to an end.
That was that in Europe there should be no change of borders without mutual consent. When President Putin took Crimea, he did it without a single casualty. It was peaceful. There was a referendum.
And it was overwhelming to be part of Russia. And although it might have been exaggerated in the numbers, there is every reason to think that well over two-thirds of the residents in Crimea preferred to be in Russia if they made that choice because the Ukrainians were depriving them of full rights because of their language and citizenship. And yet, I would say he had a referendum. In Kosovo, there was no referendum, just a vote of the assembly.
So we began to accuse him of acting illegally when we had given him a direct precedent for that. And then regarding his later attack on Ukraine, we forget that, as I said, The United States attacked Iraq, occupied it totally. And what did our press talk about? How brilliant the operation was.
And yet it was totally without any approval of the United Nations Security Council. And later, I would say the attack on Libya. Which was not opposed by the Security Council because Russia abstained and yet this was another case that Libya had not attacked any NATO country so you begin to see NATO being used as an offensive alliance outside its supposed competence to make war on countries that have not directly threatened any of its members.
And I would say that today the United States and other NATO countries are treating Ukraine as if it were a member, because if Ukraine were a member of NATO, The Western countries would be obligated to do no more than they are doing now in supplying the military means, and particularly the means used to attack Russia. So it does seem to me that it is certainly not approving what has happened. I’m horrified by what has happened. It was clear to me from the beginning when we started expanding NATO that if we continued this, we were going to come up against just sort of the situation we have today.
Hovik Manucharyan: Ambassador, as we draw to a close, I would like to ask for your word of advice. Previously, I believe you have talked and you have promoted, you have evangelized that diplomatic corps need to have more training in area studies, specifically in small countries like Armenia, like the South Caucasus countries. And that may be part of the misunderstanding or part of the reason why We have conflicts in these areas today. But I wanted to ask, maybe to provide more detail, how serious do you think this problem is in terms of diplomatic training?
Would a better understanding of our region by U.S. diplomats, by Western diplomats potentially help them navigate diplomacy in the region better and potentially help avoid wars if they could?
Jack Matlock: I think that It is very disturbing that the whole, I would say, tendency toward area studies graduate area studies in the United States has very much deteriorated since the Cold War when we saw it as sort of a national need to develop people who Who had a knowledge of other languages and cultures. And I myself was a product of those studies in my study of Russian and the Soviet Union, financed by grants from several foundations. And I think at one point when I was deputy director of our Foreign Service Institute, I tried to improve our instruction of both the languages and area studies for our diplomats.
I think the studies have been very much weakened recently, and unfortunately I would say our professional diplomats are now suffering from A virtual attack on the professionals in the State Department. And we have an administration that is using amateurs to do most of the negotiating. And I’m sure these people want to find a peaceful solution. But in order to do that, in order to Be effective.
You really have to understand the culture, the people. You have to show respect for them. You can’t just be threatening all the time. And so it does seem to me that we and our NATO allies have abandoned diplomacy when it comes to dealing with Russia, and we certainly have abandoned diplomacy when it comes to dealing with the conflicts in the Middle East.
So I think these are real problems today.
Asbed Bedrossian: Paul Jay Ambassador,
Asbed Bedrossian: as a final question, Given Armenia’s so-called pivot to the West that’s going on right now, do you have any advice for the Armenian government that would help it avoid zero-sum solutions and avoid the experience of Ukraine, whether it is war or economic calamity?
Jack Matlock: Well, as I said before, I think Armenia, like its neighbors, Need to avoid taking sides in, you might say, these broader conflicts. And it’s going to be very important to have peaceful relations with its neighbors. And maybe they can’t always be intimate and friendly, although it would be better if they weren’t. But the main thing, I think, is to avoid being drawn into some A broader struggle so-called between Western civilization and so on.
I think these divisive ideas are in effect directions that are going to bring us to catastrophe. And I think Western civilization as we define it has a lot to defend it, but it is also It was a civilization that carried out an imperialistic control of much of the world and there’s a reaction to this now. And I think we have to understand that the day of empires is over and any attempt to achieve them as the United States did by Trying to achieve world dominance using its military power and its economic strength is not bringing us peace and ultimately is not in the United States or anybody else.
So the smaller countries, particularly those in, I would say, an ethnically very varied area Have every, I think, need to preserve their unique values of their civilization, but doing so without getting drawn into broader struggles that can only be destructive.
Asbed Bedrossian: Ambassador, thank you so much for spending time with us and sharing your experiences. We are thankful for it.
Jack Matlock: And I’ll tell you, I love your country.
Asbed Bedrossian: Thank you so much. Thank you.
Hovik Manucharyan: Thank you for your service and thank you for all of your advice.
Asbed Bedrossian: Yeah, we love our country as well. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye.
Jack Matlock: Thanks a lot for the invitation. Thank you.
Hovik Manucharyan: Thank you.
Asbed Bedrossian: That’s our show today.
Asbed Bedrossian: That was a great episode with Ambassador Matlock, recorded on August 27, 2026. Ambassador Jack Matlock Jr. is a distinguished American diplomat and historian who served as a central figure in Cold War diplomacy, culminating in his role as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991 during the collapse of the USSR. Throughout his 35 years of Foreign Service career, he shaped superpower relations by participating in nearly every major U.S.-Soviet summit over a 20-year span and advised President Ronald Reagan on national security strategy.
Ambassador Matlock is a scholar of Russian language and literature and holds a Ph.D. In Slavic languages from Columbia University. For more information, of course, you can go to our show notes, podcasts.groong.org slash episode number. Click on the bios and check them out.
Hovik Manucharyan: Guests and visitors, if you have discovered our podcast through Jack Matlock, we are a small podcast, but we cover the region of South Caucasus pretty intensely. So if this area interests you, please make sure you’re subscribed and like, comment, and share in order to ensure that we reach more people. Thank you very much.
Asbed Bedrossian: Take care. I’m Asbed Bedrossian.
Hovik Manucharyan: And I’m Hovik Manucharyan. Have a great day. Talk to you soon.