evidence: So we tried to focus this around soft connectivity. What could we do—the United States—to help ease customs and border procedures or help the five adopt common customs standards, which is something they had not had since the Soviet days, because in the Soviet days they never had to work any of that out. Moscow would just decide by administrative fiat, but now you had five independent countries suddenly having to negotiate crossborder arrangements that they never had to do before, amid an atmosphere of a lot of hostility among them. [...] The Biden people could take a lesson out of President Bush's book about how at least to pursue complementary, if not necessarily joint, policies in service to American self-interest. That ends us where we started. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but I— [...] They'd flip him the bird. [laughter]