Former NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander “Sandy” Vershbow on the challenge posed by Russia

When someone with the long-range perspective of Alexander "Sandy" Vershbow says relations with Russia are the worst he's seen in his entire career, everyone should take notice. Vershbow has been a student of the Soviet Union and Russia for many decades, rising to the highest levels of the US State Department, the Pentagon and NATO.  Before his recently-ended tenure as NATO's deputy secretary general, Vershbow had served as the American ambassador to the Alliance from 1998 to 2001 and to Moscow from 2001 to 2005.  With all that Russia-watching history, Vershbow says he'd have to go back to the Berlin crises of the early 1960s to imagine "as volatile and unpredictable and dangerous a situation as we have now."