 He led the Project on Democratic Transitions of the Foreign Policy Research Institute as its director from its launch in January 2005.The Project was a two-year assessment of the economic, political, and social changes in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, to see if lessons learned could improve reforms in Russia and other countries.In 2006, he published an article identifying 19 of the 28 former communist countries as "successful" transitions with a number of similarities He has since written more pessimistically about the progress of democratization in the former Soviet bloc, however, and urged stronger U.S. interest In 2008 he wrote