REFERENCE

Welcome, my name is Glenn Deason, I'm a professor at the University of Southeastern Norway. With me is Alexander Mercouris and the guest today is none other than Jack Matlock. So Mr Matlock, he was the ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991 and held the position there in Moscow as the Cold War was negotiated to an end. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you're also stationed at the US embassy in Moscow from 1961 and you were there during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62. Matlock's background from both politics and also being an historian has made his books extremely interesting. If you don't get the history right then politics doesn't really make any sense, so Matlock is definitely one that has both the political background and the background as an historian, which is why his books such as Autopsy of an Empire, Reagan and Gorbachev and Superpower Illusions, these are all excellent books which I definitely always recommend to my own students. So our purpose today is to explore some of Matlock's experience, insights and his work. So we're going to first just look at, discuss topics from how the Cold War ended in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of the mistakes done in terms of establishing a post-Cold War settlement and hopefully if we have time as well, how these failures of the past may have contributed to the conflict we're currently in Europe and if there's any way out. So let's jump straight into it and I guess the history of how the Cold War ended is obviously one of Matlock's great contributions given that he had such a key role but also being a key focus of his writing. So it's argued in your book that, well you explore many of these Cold War myths, as you argue in your book about Reagan and Gorbachev that one of the myths was that Reagan wasn't bashing the Soviets until they surrendered, leading to a victory. So often we have this narrative of Reagan calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, he confronted the evil and then, you know, evil collapsed. Now you dispute this narrative and argue that Reagan not only showed interest in peace, but a common narrative is that he only pursued this in his second term, but as you write, he talked about a peaceful settlement already from his first day in office in 1981 and you then described him very frank and direct, seeking again a peace through a settlement. I was just wondering if you could comment on how you saw this final period in the Cold War between Reagan and Gorbachev? Well, you know, I was privileged to be in the White House advising President Reagan on his policy towards the Soviet Union from 1983 and then in 1987 I was sent as the United States ambassador to Moscow, as you have mentioned, so that I was able to witness, you might say from the inside, the way the relationship developed during that period. And quite frankly, I think most people, both in the United States and in Europe, many people, maybe even most, have a very mistaken idea of how this happened. First of all, the idea that the end of the Cold War was something like a victory of the West over the Soviet Union, I think is incorrect. We negotiated an end to the Cold War, and we negotiated it with the benefit of ending it an equal one for both sides. Now this required a change in certain Soviet policies, but these changes occurred about and they occurred peacefully. Now, you know, as I began to work with President Reagan and I was brought on his staff with the specific task of developing a negotiating strategy to end the arms race and if possible the Cold War itself. And that strategy was a peaceful one, and President Reagan very much condemned communism, and but he never, you know, he never condemned Russia, Russia. He understood that the problem was the communist system that was ideological and not something that should be attributed to a single nationality. So and as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, his attitude was communism is a bad system, but if they want it, that's their business. What we object to is they're enforcing it on other people, particularly using force to impose it on others. They need to stop imposing it on others, and that is precisely what Gorbachev did, and particularly in ideologically when he abandoned Marxism-Lindonism, that is the communist philosophy, as the basis of his foreign policy, which he did publicly December 7, 1988, in a speech at the United Nations, then in effect he removed what had been the basic cause of the Cold War. So the Cold War ended, certainly ideologically, by the end of 1988, while President Reagan was still president. Now there were a lot of problems that developed, particularly the domination, the communist domination of Eastern Europe, that were only resolved until the next year, but they were resolved peacefully, and not because of Western pressure. The idea that we sort of spent some to defeat is absolutely wrong. We negotiated an end in the interests of everybody, including the Soviet Union, and then people say yeah, but the Soviet Union broke up, true, but it broke up not because of Western pressure, but precisely because of two things. One thing, the Cold War was over, the Western military pressure had ceased by 1989, when Eastern Europe went free, peacefully on the whole, certainly without any Soviet intervention. And then the second thing is that the Soviet Union broke up because of internal pressures that were unleashed when Gorbachev tried to democratize the country by taking the Communist Party out of complete control, and by refusing to use force to suppress the separatist tendencies. First time in Russian history that had been the case, and so that you had a leader in the Soviet Union who was a genuine Democrat with a little d, and who was genuinely trying to change the system. Now the system turned out couldn't be changed so easily, there was opposition and particularly the strength of local nationalisms tore it apart. So the idea that the Cold War ended when the Soviet Union in effect collapsed is untrue. That was two years after the Cold War ideologically had ended. And well after the liberation, you might say, of Eastern Europe and so on. At that time, the United States policy, the elder Bush, George H.W. Bush was president. I was still in Moscow as ambassador for a couple of years after he became president. And you know, our policy then was not to try to break up the Soviet Union. We were very determined to try to get the three Baltic states, the three Baltic countries to get their independence. We had never recognized that they were legally part of the Soviet Union. But at the same time, we thought that it would be the benefit of everybody if Gorbachev could lead them into a voluntary federation, a voluntary federation of the other 12 republics, including most specifically, Ukraine. And that's why on August 1st, if I remember the date correctly, August 1st, 1991, George Bush gave a speech to the Ukrainian parliament, the Vyhovna Rada, where he endorsed Gorbachev's federation idea, advised them to cooperate with him in a voluntary federation and warned against suicidal nationalism. I think he was absolutely wise to do that. And now not everybody in his administration agreed with this. But George Bush put that in his speech personally. I was on the plane with him between when he flew from Moscow to Kiev. And he added it in his speech in his own handwriting, called me into his compartment and said, is this OK? Do you agree? And I told him I did. So now, you know, later some members of the administration, well, it didn't really mean it or something like that. That isn't true. So to get back to your original points, one of the things that has distorted Western policy and Russian policy since the end of the Cold War is a misinterpretation, first of all, of how it happened, who was defeated and what this implied for the future. And it seems to me the idea that the West or the US or NATO was triumphant in bringing down the Soviet Union is absolutely wrong and also has been at the root of many of our mistaken policies since. Well, yeah, that's one of the things that really stand out from the book, that how this is not just one, but how this really how effectively a negotiation, a process of mutual respect recognizing each other's security interests led to a common peace, how this suddenly became a narrative of victory in terms of confronting the adversary, outspending them and then effectively imposing regime change and then having a full victory that the lessons of history went from in the negotiations to the defeat and victories and toppling governments. Which is why I thought it was interesting actually posting as the title in one of your books and sections, which is why history must be understood correctly. Can I just ask Mr. Matlock a question here, because I remember the last years of the Cold War, when I said last years, I don't just mean the very last years, I mean the entire period from the 1960s. And my recollection of it was that the overriding objective of US and Western policy at that time was not to achieve victory at any point, it was to secure peace. It was to establish a stable peace in Europe and not just Europe, but in the world and to avoid the disaster of nuclear war. And I remember Ronald Reagan very well, I remember him at the time when he was president. And again, my impression of Reagan was that again, one of the things that drove him very strongly was a desire ultimately to achieve peace. It was not again, victory that he was seeking. And first of all, just the question, I mean, would you basically agree with this view that, you know, way back in the 1960s, through the détente period, beyond the détente period, even during the tense period that we had in the late 70s, early 1980s, that desire to avoid a clash, a military clash between the superpowers to preserve peace was the overriding one. And the second one, and my own view, is that it was precisely because that peace was secured that the political changes in the Soviet Union became possible. When there was this period of tension, that was what stood in the way of political change. And it's because now we are seeing confrontation take its place, that we're seeing again the hardening of the systems. The confrontation atmosphere is causing political changes in Russia in a direction perhaps that we don't like. And a complex question, but anyway, that's my question essentially. That was a very long question. As I understand it, you're discussing the possibility of establishing a pan-European security system in the 1990s. Yes, I think that was the task that we should have, we in the United States and Western Europe should have tried to create. And I think the possibility was there to creating it. And I think that, for example, the original proposal for a partnership between the members of NATO and other countries in Europe and Eurasia that had developed was a fine one. I think that this provided flexibility, it provided for cooperation. It did not bring about a unified military structure or divide Europe again. So I think we started. But on the other hand, the countries failed to create a sort of an operative security structure, which would also include the countries that had broken up in the Soviet Union. And I think that was a great diplomatic failure of the 1990s. And I also think it was a mistake to begin expanding NATO. And I argued at the time that this would be a big mistake. And because once you start expanding, how do you stop? And at a certain point, you have to stop unless NATO includes everybody in Europe, because otherwise it's going to create a line of security problems for the other side. And it's going to make it look as if the end of the Cold War was a military victory, which is being exploited by the West and by NATO. And there was no threat against any of them militarily at that time. So it seemed to me it made no sense. Now what did make sense was economic cooperation. Let's not forget that the countries of Eastern Europe, just like the former Soviet Union, were changing the whole orientation of their economy, which is a very profound shift. This was hard for all, but it was particularly hard for those in the Soviet Union, which had been imposed on, the communist system imposed on them for more than 70 years. And countries like then Czechoslovakia, Poland, it had been a shorter period, just during the post World War II period, and in countries like Poland, they had never suffered the collectivization of agriculture that had so damaged the economies of those that were in the Soviet Union. And so it seemed to me that there was a major problem of shifting from what had been the state and communist party control systems to a free market assistance and market economics. This was a problem that should be made a mutual problem, and we should leave any military threats or security interests out of it, because it was going to be hard enough politically. Now if you start expanding NATO at the same time that you are trying to build a European Union and build it closer, and eventually bring in the East Europeans and one would hope Russia into a continent wide, you might say free trade system, that of course should have been the goal. But when you combine sort of psychologically attempts to change the economy, and you know what you have to understand is that when this process is going on, the people who have been in control during the communist period are going to become the losers, and other people are seen as the winners. So this gets very deep in domestic politics. And for outsiders, as we all should understand, outsiders getting involved in another country's domestic politics doesn't necessarily help the ones they want to. Often it can hinder them. And so the idea that we had to bring in the East Europeans who were not being threatened by anybody, particularly not by Russia in the 90s, who were simply trying to find jobs for all the military that had to be placed in the civilian economy. And frankly, it seemed to me that nobody had a magic formula for changing the communist system into a productive capitalist system. It had to be done in stages, but it could be more easily done, much more easily done in a cooperative way when there was no implication that this had military or security implications. And when, even though the members of NATO and the members of the EU were not precisely the same, I mean Norway was in NATO and Sweden was not and so on, Switzerland wasn't in any of them still. Basically NATO became simply, basically militarily Western Europe and North America, US and Canada. And so it seemed to me obvious, number one, that you start expanding it and it's going to be seen as being hostile on the other side, at taking advantage of a negotiated into the Cold War as if it were a military victory. And so that's why I very strongly advised against NATO expansion. And we also added at the time, when you start, how are you going to stop? Because for a whole lot of reasons, you are going to have to stop if you start expanding NATO before you are considering any of the, what I would call the 12 legal, that is recognized parts of the Soviet Union. Because most of these for centuries had been part of the same state. And so that in a way, it was pretty clear from the beginning that a Russian government may not like it, but they would tolerate Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and NATO. They would even accept most Russians, those three Baltic countries, recognizing that they had a rather different history from the others. But when you get to Ukraine and Georgia, this is something else. And no Russian government was going to be comfortable with that. That I think should have been obvious to everybody with even some smattering of knowledge of history of that area. And yet, obviously, that's not the course that US and Western policy followed. And I think that is a great tragedy. Let me add one thing, though, I've been at conferences discussing this. And some commentators said, well, it was a great failure in 1991. At the time when the Berlin Wall was coming down, we were negotiating the unity of the two German states and so on. Something that was basically determined by the German people, ultimately. But as we were discussing these things, others said, well, why didn't you create the European security system then? Let me tell you, I don't think we could have in 1991, because we still had very new governments in Eastern Europe, governments, all of which had major internal problems. The Germans had the whole problem of how you really unify the economy of the two Germanies. It turns out they did it about as successfully as humanly possible. But who knew in 1991 how this was going to work out? And you could only work out a European security system with everybody participating in it. It's not something that could be imposed by the United States and its Western allies. That was not going to work. What happened was, by trying to impose an expanding NATO, we created the conditions that we face today with war once again in Europe. I'm glad you brought it to that point, because in your book, you even refer to NATO expansion as you could compare it to the mistake made at Versailles in 1919 with the effort of securing peace through a permanent weak Germany or an exclusionary security architecture. I thought it was interesting because it reminds me of George Kennan at times, who shared your concerns and being also very critical of NATO expansion. He also gave an interview, I remember in 1998, when he pointed out what you said now as well, that at one point Russia would react very negative to NATO expansion. And again, at this point, we would then end up in a conflict. And he predicted that the West would then solely blame Russia for this conflict. And so I thought it was interesting you landed at this conflict in Ukraine now, because do you consider the expansion of NATO to be one of the main or one of the causes of this conflict? Again, not to alleviate Russia of any responsibility, but do you draw that connection as well with NATO expansion leading to this war in Ukraine? Well, of course, Russia is responsible for its decision to invade Ukraine. No question about that. It was a decision which I think is going to be disastrous for both countries, both Ukraine and Russia. I would only say that, as I argued earlier, if our policies had been different, I think it is most likely that decision would not have been made. Now that doesn't excuse it. And as I think it was Telly who once commented, or maybe it was Metternich, when a certain decision was made and he described it as worse than a crime, a mistake. So yes, but I think that if one looks deeply into the roots of the current war in Ukraine, you would have to conclude that it could have been avoided and it almost certainly would have been avoided if there had not been the threat of NATO expansion and the actual military involvement of NATO countries in Ukraine after its, one could call them, troubles in 2014 when the government was changed and became much less representative of the whole country. But the problem here is that Ukraine's problems are fundamentally internal. And it is the, you would say, the interference of outsiders, not just Russia, but also the West and the US, which has created what is basically an internal problem of a country which has tried to combine two different interpretations of what it means to be Ukrainian in one country. And it never had, since its independence, a leader able to unite these two factions. And the West has gotten involved, particularly the United States and some of the other EU countries have gotten directly involved in its internal politics, as has Russia. And so this has become, I think, in an artificial way and a way which no one is going to win a contest between East and West. And Ukraine, I think, cannot create a flourishing, happy, productive country in the land that it inherited unless it has policies which allow it to have reasonably good relations with Russia. And that means that you've got to treat its Russian-speaking population as loyal Ukrainians who have their own culture, which they too want to preserve. And what most people ignore is that Joseph Stalin, as a gift of Hitler, is the one who brought the Western areas of Galicia and Volhynia into what was in Ukraine, creating a country with two competing conditions of what it means to be Ukrainian. One of them respects the fact that some of them prefer the Russian language and are more comfortable in it, even though they can be loyal Ukrainians. And yet what we have now is a situation which one of them, now the Western side, which had not until the eve of the Second World War had ever been part of Russia, whereas the Eastern parts had been. So you have that internal division and you can see it in the voting at every one of the elections they've had. But the current government of 2014 was first elected by a rump legislature which did not include a lot of the representatives after the violence in 2014, which seems to have been started in the West, not in the East, in the Russian part. And since then, we have had a government in Ukraine, which the Russians consider the result of a coup d'état, backed by the West. And frankly, there's a lot of evidence to support that. It's not a total lie. It may be an exaggeration, it's not a lie. And this whole situation has been confused by what I think massive propaganda on both sides. You know, both Ukraine and Russia, after all, inherited their security organizations, their information organizations from those that were created in the Soviet Union. And I think the outside world is faced with contentious information that has been coming from all sides. So I think that all the governments involved have made very fundamental mistakes and it's going to be very hard to solve this now. Well, I agree with your analysis, because I think the divisions between East and West Ukraine, one of the key problems they've had is trying to find a way to harmonize them. Because if you're in West Ukraine, you have this one ethnicity, one culture, one language. If you're in the East, you see two languages, two cultures, two ethnicities. I think they worked against each other to a large extent on nation building. I think the problem is the external actors, both the West and the Russians, because obviously Russia would like the Eastern Ukrainians to represent the real Ukraine, while in the West, because we tried to create this Europe without Russia, which avoidedly made us support the Western Ukrainians, who then doesn't lead to much democracy now, I guess, if they're going to suppress all the Russian speakers, I'm not sure if you agree with that, Alexander. Well, I would, please, please continue. It's very hard for an outsider or even an insider to judge some of these things, undoubtedly. The Russian invasion has turned, I would say, you know, it's bound to have turned some Russian, a lot of Russian speaking Ukrainians against Russia. I think, but what I think those, you might say, Ukrainian nationalists haven't taken into account is that if you have a country with substantial minorities of people of a different culture, even if they have been at sometimes in their history, the oppressors, that if you want to create a loyal country, you have got to give them cultural rights. Look at Finland, you know, for years sort of dominated by Sweden, later by Russia. But when they declared independence, those areas that were Swedish speaking, I think at least 20% had their right to their schools. And you know, in Helsinki, you had a Swedish theater and a Finnish theater, a Swedish national newspaper and a Finnish national newspaper, and the Swedish speakers became just as loyal to Finland, the Finlanders, as did the Finnish speakers. And everybody could sort of, after schooling, understand both languages. Or look at Belgium, you know, if the French speaking Valens, you know, kept saying, well, you know, they didn't want to be part of France. And you know, they don't always see things the same way as the Flemings. But Belgium is able to create, you know, a very successful country giving equal rights to both. And then, of course, when you get to Switzerland, you have four different nationalities, three of them being the same as a neighboring country. And yet they by giving equal rights to everybody, they have created a very successful Swiss identity and so on. Or look at Ireland. If they had said to be, you know, to be a real Irish citizen, you've got to speak Gaelic, you can't speak English. Why would that have worked? So I think when you look at other countries, you say, you know, what is this idea? That if you're Russian speaking, you're hostile to Ukraine, you can't be a Ukrainian? I mean, it really makes no sense. And I'm afraid that is the attitude which dominates the current government. And that's why, for one thing, they cannot, on that basis, create a successful country in all of the land that they inherited in 1991. That's just not going to be possible unless there's genocide of the Russian speaking population. And you know, I don't… so many people who look at this, I think, really ignore some of these basic things.

But the basic thing is these are problems that need to be determined internally by the Ukrainians and the involvement of outsiders, I think, has been deleterious, whether it was by the Russians or by the Europeans or by the Americans. I think that it is never a good idea for a foreign country to get directly involved in the internal politics of another. You end up actually hindering the people you think you're trying to favour.

Well, I mean, I obviously agree. I would also say that I think we need to be much more measured in our language in the West, certainly in Britain, when we discuss Ukraine. And this has been a major problem now. Our language, our rhetoric has got so inflamed that it's very difficult for people to take a step back and consider the points that we've just heard. Can I say something in addition to this, which is that right at the start, over the course of this discussion, there was the point about NATO expansion being one of the roots of the problem in Ukraine. And we've also heard this point about Ukrainian nationalism and its difficulty in accepting that there is differences within Ukraine and that this has also been a problem. I think what has caused a major intersection is that those two things came together in the sense that the moment NATO was offered as a prospect for Ukraine, it became immediately an issue between Ukrainians themselves, which deepened these divisions that we've just heard about and made the clash of nationalisms and identities greater still. I'm not sure what the question was, as I say, my hearing is not perfect. It wasn't a question. It was just a point that, as I said, the moment NATO membership was offered to Ukrainians, some Ukrainians who were nationalists would be minded to support it, other Ukrainians who were Russian speakers would not be so happy, and that intensified the divisions in Ukraine, and that was something that ought to have been foreseeable at the time. I'm curious, Don…

Yes, these are, you point to, I think, some very important matters. I would say that I believe anyone interested in the background of the current conflict in Ukraine should read a book just published this month by Nicolai Petro, a professor at the University of Rhode Island called “The Tragedy of Ukraine”. That is the most balanced and I think complete examination of the historical and cultural factors that are operative here. And I think he goes very objectively looking at matters from both sides, if you want to speak of what he would call the Ukrainian nationalist side in the West and the Novorossiya, the idea that you can be Ukrainian but also speak Russian, which seemed to dominate in the East and the South. He explores, I think, very clearly the historic basis of these, how different you might say legends of the historical character differ on both sides. He names the historians and their things and he reports on events, particularly since 2014, much of which time he spent in Ukraine. And unlike many, he spent time in both East and West, not just in West or just in Kyiv. And anyway, what he points out is that this is really similar to a Greek tragedy. And he actually finds inspiration from the Greek tragedy and trying to understand it. So he sees the only possibility later is a reconciliation between the two, more communication between the two, and you might say a truth and reconciliation procedure. Well, you know, I think that is the most insightful book I have read. But I think, can one predict that this is going to happen? I think that, you know, frankly, every step many of the involved governments have made make it more and more difficult, and particularly the declaration by the Russian Parliament of parts of Ukraine as parts of Russia, you know, they're making decisions which clearly violate international law and practice. You can't just proclaim part of another country part of yours, even though on cultural grounds there, you know, there are similarities. So it does seem to me that both sides have made decisions and are making decisions that mean nothing but conflict in the future. And these are not going to be decided by military means alone. In fact, I think the use of the military to deal with essentially internal political problems has been a disaster for everybody. And so it's very difficult for me to be optimistic in anything like the near term. I think that eventually it's bound to be that much of that North America and particularly in the United States and maybe less so in Canada, which has a very strong influence of Western Ukrainians and much of Western Europe is going to begin to get rather tired of what is going to be an enormous burden, whether it's of refugees or of inflated prices because of the attempt to cut Russia out of most economic transactions in Europe. It complicates almost everything, whether it comes from dealing with global warming or further development of resources in a way that allows us to accept the many refugees that are going to come into Europe and North America for reasons that have nothing to do with this, but because of starvation and violence elsewhere in the world. So the big issues and meanwhile, we're still dealing with a pandemic and there could be others coming on and to be fighting over where that border is and whether there should be cultural rights for Russian citizens of Ukraine seems to me crazy. I mean, we've got bigger issues that we need to be dealing with and I will not see the results in my lifetime. Do you think Ukraine would have to make any territorial concession in order to get in a settlement at the end or do you envision any other form of settlements? Well, I don't see how this is going to be ended. I don't see how it's going to be ended or how Ukraine is going to hold itself together if it waits until it so-called reconquers all the territory and that's particularly true of Crimea where most of the people probably prefer to be in Russia. But on the other hand, as long as the Ukraine supporters allow them to sort of make that decision of nationality, it is going to prevent. But on the other hand, one can say that there's no way that they should be conceding that Zaporizhzhia, some of the other southern provinces that Russia claims are going to be considered as part of Russia. I think that demand Russia is making is one that no Ukrainian government could agree to. But the problem is that I think now in the West, the whole anti-Russian sort of you can't be Russian speaking and Ukrainian because Russia is an evil country and it's an evil language and we've got to abandon Russian books and so on. This attitude seems more and more to dominate in the East. And when you have that sort of attitude, how do you get inside the country that sort of recognition? And it seems to me that both of the sides have painted themselves into positions that are unworkable and this is as true of the Russian position as it is of the Ukrainian. Now ultimately, if it is going to be solved, it has to be solved between the Russians and Ukrainians. And my contention is that outsiders have created more problems than they have solved. And if outsiders had stayed out of it before, we probably would never have had this war in Ukraine. That's my opinion. But everybody is involved and everybody, particularly in Europe, is going to be involved in the fallout. I mean, how many Ukrainian refugees are going to stay in Western Europe rather than going back? And how is this going to affect relations within their countries? And so on. I mean, historically, these Western Ukrainians have been more anti-Polish than anti-Russian. Of course, that was when the Poles were trying to impose Polish culture on them. But I don't think you can predict the future other than if the Western policy of weakening Russia succeeds, that it's not going to be in the interest of Europe, in the interest of peace, or in the interest of development. Because we need Russia to cooperate in all of the things that affect us all. Whether it be global warming, whether it be pandemics, whether it be dealing with refugees, because they take in a lot of refugees from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus themselves. And you cannot have a healthy Europe unless it has a healthy economic relationship with Russia. I mean, that's just not going to happen. And yet nobody has really defined what it will take to get the sanctions off on Russia other than their complete capitulation in Ukraine. Now, I think these policies really are making it very, very difficult to settle on any terms. And as the war progresses, Ukraine is going to be piece by piece more and more destroyed. And this is one of the tragedies. And yes, Russia is suffering greatly from it in all its various ways. And yet, in the final analysis, what is happening is not in the interest of Ukraine, or Western Europe, or Russia, or for that matter, North America. And that's the tragedy today.

So again, if people are really interested in this, get hold of Nicolai Petro's book, “The Tragedy of Ukraine”, and I think they'll understand much better that the situation we're facing today is one that's not going to be solved by the policies of any of the major participants as they are currently articulated. That's the bad news. And frankly, I don't see much good news ahead.

Thanks very much. Jack Matlock, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. This has been very interesting. Thank you.