Category: US

In this episode of Conversations on Groong, we speak with Ambassador Jack Matlock, the last US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, about whether the West missed a historic opportunity to integrate Russia into Western security architecture after the Cold War. We discuss the internal collapse of the Soviet Union, Reagan-Gorbachev diplomacy, NATO expansion and Russian backlash, and how Cold War-era decisions shape Armenia’s geopolitical choices today, including Matlock’s firsthand observations of Soviet Armenia during glasnost and the Nagorno Karabakh movement.

Scott Horton joins us to examine the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, asking how this war began, what strategic goals are driving it, and where it could lead next. We discuss the limits of air power, the risk of a wider or ground war, the longer arc of U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran and Syria, Turkey’s role in the region, and the domestic political consequences inside the United States as Trump presses ahead without broad public or congressional support.