Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic

is Russia, Ukraine, and Global Instability.

With me to discuss the origins of Russia's war in Ukraine and the repercussions for world order is Michael Kimmage. Michael is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and a senior associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department where he held the Russia-Ukraine portfolio. He is the author of the new book, Collisions, the Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability. Michael, thank you for coming back on the President's Inbox. Congratulations on the publication of Collisions.

Thanks so much and really great to be back with you, Jim.

I want to get to the question, Michael, of the origin of Russia's war in Ukraine and what it means for global affairs. But I'd like to begin with why you wrote collisions. You are a historian by training. Historians typically pick up their pens or put their fingers to their laptop keyboards after events have concluded. Why write a history about the origins of a war that is still unfolding?

The first answer I think is that we very much need a history of this war, even though it's going to be inadequate inevitably because there's a lot of evidence that we don't have and we also don't know how the war ends, which is crucial to understanding what this war is going to mean. But we are, as we all know, inundated by social media. This is a war that brings a lot of intense, loud headlines. It's easy, I think, to get trapped in the news cycle and to see this war as a series of discrete 24-hour events or 48-hour events. I think to gain, first of all, a good analytical understanding of it, we need to go back in time and think historically. But I also feel, maybe with even more emphasis, that for good policymaking, there has to be a historical arc of understanding. There's going to be a work in progress. It's going to be a collective effort with lots of different journalists and policy makers and historians weighing in. But that's how I wanted to

contribute.