Cold War

Pashinyan presents contentious five-year government program amid church confrontation, opposition arrests, and deepening rifts with Russia over EU membership and CSTO participation.

Ambassador Jack Matlock, the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, examines whether the West missed a historic opportunity to integrate Russia into Western security architecture after the Cold War, and reflects on how Cold War-era decisions shape Armenia’s geopolitical choices today. Arthur G. Martirosyan discusses Armenia’s post-election political crisis, the arrest of opposition leaders including Robert Kocharyan, attacks on the Armenian Church, border concessions including Tigranashen, the TRIPP corridor, and how the Established Opposition is strategizing under state repression in what Pashinyan calls the Fourth Republic.

Ambassador Matlock recalls witnessing the removal of Stalin’s statue from Victory Park in Yerevan during Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in the early 1960s.

Matlock contrasts Reagan’s respectful Cold War diplomacy with contemporary Western leaders’ public insults toward foreign counterparts, arguing the shift undermines conflict resolution.

Matlock, present at the negotiations, provides firsthand testimony that James Baker did assure the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand eastward, and explains how this pledge was later circumvented.

Ambassador Matlock argues that internal Soviet weaknesses, not Western military or economic pressure, caused the USSR’s collapse, and that the Cold War had already ended before the Union broke apart.

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.