 I was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the USSR, at that time, in 1963. With a Jewish father and an Armenian mother, I was raised as a Soviet with a dominant Russian culture. I was always very political by nature, and on the road to the World Championship this led me into frequent conflicts with the authorities, since chess was considered an important tool to promote the intellectual superiority of the USSR over the decadent West. Needless to say, my frequent pro-Western statements did not gain me any favor at home. As a young man in the 80s, I looked to America as a symbol of the values and freedom I wanted for my own country. Today I live in New York City, and unfortunately I'm still fighting for freedom for my country, Russia. Two years ago, for reasons beyond my control, I moved from Russia to New York, but I spent much of my life in between Europe. For centuries, Europe was the center of the civilized world, the center of power, and of the ideas that moved the world forward. Politics, technology, philosophy, industry, it all came together in Europe and was exported to the rest of the world. Europe is also the birthplace of the modern world order, the concept of consensus and borders. But the dynamic growth centers today are America and Asia, and growth is what gets the most attention, not ideas or philosophy. Europe is called the old continent, the old world, as if the rest of the world is saying, thank you, but we took what we needed and don't need you anymore. But those who say this are very wrong, dangerous the wrong, and we need the ideas and leadership of Europe today more than ever. It is ironic that Europe today is back on the front line of the war on modernity. In the 20th century, Europe was home to some of the worst horrors humanity has ever seen. Yet today, Europe represents peace, unity, and the power of enlightenment ideals to unite. But the forces of the past of brutality and violence are attacking the free world here where it was born. Religious extremists use Europe's openness against it to launch terror attacks. A dictator challenges the borders and alliances of Europe for the first time since the end of World War II. What succeeds or fails here will set the course for the rest of the world, as has been the case for centuries. Europe must not fail. Europe must not fall. Our goal must be to help those stuck in the past to join the present, and it cannot be done only by force. We must be sincere and make an overwhelmingly attractive case. But this does not mean cutting or tolerating violent extremists or those who create them at home or abroad. An open society that cannot defend its citizens will not be open for very long. Symbols met us in this fight. Symbols like Charlie Hebdo and photographs of the world leaders marching together for free speech. It is not enough to tell our immigrants, our citizens, and the billions of souls still living in the unfree world that these ideas matter. We must show them. The terrorists and their teachers and the dictators and their enablers are quick to point out every hypocrisy, every double standard. We cannot compromise for, as Victor Hugo wrote in The Toilers of the Sea, man grow accustomed to poison by degrees. In my mind, the first drop of poison on European soil was Ayatollah Khamenei's fatwa for death against a British citizen, the author Salman Rushdie in 1989. While Rushdie's life was protected, Britain, even under Margaret Thatcher, and the free world failed to stand up to this unprecedented attack on Rushdie's freedom of speech. That was in fact a great deal of sympathy about how his book, The Satanic Versus Offended Muslims, jumped forward to 2006 when British citizen Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence officer who exposed many crimes by the Putin's regime, was assassinated in London with the radioactive substance Polodium 210. The suspect fled back to Russia, where not only was he protected from extradition, but he promptly joined the Russian Parliament. I can't say elected, of course. It was Putin's way of showing how little he cared about the rule of law, and yet Britain and the rest of the world continued to do business with Putin and with Russia, and the investigation into the first case of nuclear terrorism was put on the shelf until recently. On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shut down over eastern Ukraine territory, occupied by invading Russian and Russian-backed forces. 298 people were killed, including 193 Dutch citizens. The scene of the crash was controlled by the same Russian forces that are now nearly unanimously blamed for shooting down MH17. And yet, it was not only Russia that denied responsibility. Europe was quick to embrace any uncertainty and eager to avoid any confrontation. But as evidence continues to accumulate that there is no doubt the plane was shut down by Russian forces under Russian control, then what? Putin will refuse to cooperate, of course, and then what? Will it still be business as usual? More engagement and more futile attempts to find a win-win situation? The attitude of finding win-win situations admirable in some ways, of course. It will be wonderful if every crisis or conflict could be ended to mutual benefit. But assuming that can happen with ISIS or with Putin ignores the true nature of the enemy. Putin's only goal is to stay in power and he has moved beyond the need for cooperation with the free world to do that. He needs conflict and hatred now. And how do you negotiate with that without betraying your ideals and your people? Al Qaeda and ISIS want to cut off the modern world of individual freedom. How does a pluralistic liberal society negotiate with that world due to mutual benefit? It cannot. At some point, reality must be faced. Western society has become dangerously risk averse and even more eager to believe blatantly contradictory messages. We ask for lower taxes but expect more government services. We demand protection while insisting on privacy. That we must sacrifice something even our lives for the values that make our society worth protecting has been forgotten. The idea of individual liberty was the sharpest sword in winning the Cold War but it has been beaten into a plowshare and now we must arm ourselves once more. But most consumers in the developed world would rather not know where their phones and gas come from as long as the prices are low. The occasional scandal over unhuman working conditions in Chinese factories or Vietnamese or Burmese is quickly and conveniently forgotten when the next shoe or next gadget comes out. The recent protests in Hong Kong or another refutation what I have mockingly referred to as the genetic concept of democracy. This is just one of many theories people born in the free world used to mask their privilege, their inaction and their shame. For years I've been told that Russians or Arabs or Chinese simply are not disposed to democracy. They require a strong hand or they love a tough leader. Condescending and ridiculous when you look at the two Germans, the two Koreas, China and Taiwan and of course now at Ukraine and Russia. What is true is that no one is simply entitled to democracy or even to basic human rights. No, these things must always be fought for. Many who speak out in favor of accommodating Putin and his aggression in Ukraine are quick to warn us of the threat of a new Cold War. This use of cliché today is ironic since how the Cold War was fought and one has been forgotten instead of emulated. Instead of standing on principles of good and evil, of right and wrong and on the universal values of human rights and human life we have engagements, resets and moral equivalents. The Cold War was not one just by military or economic superiority but on values. I as former Soviet citizen unironically used to call traditional American values or more broadly Western values. But these terms are obsolete today, even offensive. As I said, and it's a duty of every democracy, not just the United States and Western Europe, but of every free and open society from Brazil to Japan, from South Africa to Korea, to defend these values. Chief among them is the belief that individual freedom matters and it's worth sacrificing for, fighting for, even dying for. The best enemies are those against whom there are historical conflicts to resuscitate. For KGB man Putin and his clique it has been most natural to drum up anti-Americanism, praying on all Cold War memories. Another popular target are those members of society who cannot effectively fight back. The outsiders and ethnic and sexual minorities who are already under great pressure due to the destruction of civil society. Let us be clear what we are dealing with. In his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, famous historian Robert Paxton provided this concise definition. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity in which a mass-based party of committed national militants working in an easy but effective collaboration with traditional elite, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, gall of internal cleansing and external expansion. The end of quote. Previously, Italian philosopher Umberto Eco contributed a list of 14 general properties of fascist ideology that are also terrifyingly familiar to any observer of Putin's Russia today. While our ever-evolving opposition movement made some progress in drawing attention to the increasingly fascist reality of Putin's Russia, we were in a losing position from the start. The Kremlin domination of the mass media and Russia's prosecution of opposition in civil society made it impossible to build any lasting momentum. Our mission was also sabotaged by democratic leaders embracing Putin on the world stage, providing him with the leadership credentials he so badly needed in the absence of a valid elections in Russia. In today's era of globalization and false equivalence, it can be hard for many of us to recall that most Cold War leaders had seen true evil up close during World War II. They had no illusions about what dictators were capable of if given the chance. They had witnessed existential threats with their own eyes, seen the horror of the concentration camps and the use of nuclear weapons in war. In some ways, it's a shame that today the names of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin have become caricatures as if they are mythological beasts representing an ancient evil that was vanquished long ago. But evil does not die, just as history does not end. Like a weed, evil can be cut back but almost never entirely uprooted. It waits for a chance to spread through the cracks in our vigilance. It takes root in the fertile soil of our complacency, like the dragon of the Greek myth whose teeth sprouted from the ground as soldiers. The Berlin Wall fell in pieces and many of those pieces contain the seeds of evil. Nor did communism disappear when the wall fell. Nearly 1.5 billion humans still live in communist dictatorships today. And another billion and a half live in unfree states of different stripes, including of course much of the former Soviet Union. The desire of men to exploit and to rule over others by dictate and by force did not disappear. What did disappear or at least what faded dramatically was the willingness of the free world to take a firm stand in support of their press. The wall fell and the wall exhaled. The long war of generations was over. The threat of nuclear annihilation that hang over all our heads was ending. Victorious, however, even great victories come at the cost. I've written about what I call the gravity of past success in chess, the gravity of past success. Winning feels great, but it can also inhibit your development. The loser knows he made a mistake and that something went wrong and he will work hard to improve. The happy winner, on the other hand, often assumes he won simply because he is great. It takes tremendous discipline to learn lessons from a victory. The world needs a new alliance based on a new Magna Carta, a declaration of rights and practices that all member nations must recognize. Nations that value democracy and individual liberty now control the greater part of the world resources as well as its military power. If we're banned together and refuse to coddle the rogue regimes and sponsors of terror, our authority will be irresistible. Our combined wealth can also fund new technologies to cure our fossil fuel addiction, which currently empowers a majority of the terrorists and dictators. The goal should not be built new walls to isolate the millions of people living under authoritarian rule, but to come to their aid. United military intervention to protect human lives and the greater good also be kept on the table. The value of human life and the value of human freedom in the new Magna Carta must be defended as if there were borders. For that is what they are. They are borders of time and space, separating those who want to live in the modern world and those for modernity is a mortal threat. I advocate for return to many of the principles and policies that were dominant in the West during the Cold War. But what does not mean, it does not mean I want to turn back the clock. As the Bible says, no one pours new wine into old white wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins and both the wine and the wine skins will be ruined. We cannot pour the modern wine of globalization and the multipolar world into the old wineskins of the obsolete Cold War rules and regulations from the United Nations. Times change, circumstances change, institutions must change, but our values must not. Thank you.