Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock stated that the U.S. must make a greater effort to cooperate with Russia with which we have a mutual interest, and abandon the name-calling directed at Russia which has now taken hold, in a useful March 26 interview on The Scott Horton Show half hour online radio show:
Matlock said that Biden had started off in the right way, “but then to get into a personal denigration of President Putin doesn’t help us to find a way to cooperate – and there is much to cooperate on: the pandemic, global terrorism, and global warming are all areas where the U.S. and Russia have the same interests; both have differences, but these are not the deep interests which caused the Cold War. We need to take a clear look at what our interests are. The question is not what you can do to please Russia, but what we need to do for our own interest. We have issues like nuclear weapons....
“But that’s not the only issue. The second thing overall is whether Russia, China and big transnational interests that we face, are going to require cooperation with each other….