Former President Jimmy Carter, who served from 1977 to 1981, joined Consider This host Antonio Mora on March 25, 2014 to discuss his new book, "A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power," the situation in Ukraine, and national security. President Carter weighs in on how the U.S. and its allies should respond to the Russian annexation of Crimea.

Antonio Mora: We're seeing this terrible controversy in Crimea. The Russians now have tens of thousands troops on the border with Ukraine. What should President Obama, the United States, and the European Union do to stand up to this kind of aggression by Vladimir Putin? President Jimmy Carter: I don’t think there ever has been a possibility that Putin wouldn't take over Crimea. This was a foregone conclusion and nothing that the United States and Europe or anyone could have done would have prevented that. Because Russia has always considered Crimea to be a part of it and most of the Crimean people, as you probably know, agreed with that. They wanted to be a part of Russia. But I think that needs to be stopped, at this point. I don’t think we need equivocate about the prohibition against Putin moving military forces into other parts of eastern Ukraine. I had the same challenge to face when I was president. Mora: You're referring to Afghanistan — Carter: During Christmas week of 1979, the Soviets moved a massive numbers of troops into Afghanistan. And they occupied Afghanistan and I had to stop them from going further. So I did everything I could. I withdrew my ambassador from Moscow. I declared a grain embargo against them. I agreed with Congress and the American Olympic Committee, not going to the [1980 Summer] Olympics. And I began to give weapons to the freedom fighters in Afghanistan, secretly, and we used all Russian-made weapons, so that they couldn't accuse us of doing it. Mora: So should we support Ukraine militarily? Carter: I think so, yes. I do believe we should. And I also announced to [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev on public television and all that if he moved out of Afghanistan to any adjacent country, we would respond militarily and not spare any weapons that we had at our disposal. And he never did. And as you know, the freedom fighters were ultimately successful and under [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, they withdrew from Afghanistan. So I think we need to be very forceful now, making sure that Putin doesn’t go into eastern Ukraine militarily. President Carter says the NSA and intelligence agencies have "exceeded the grant of freedom that Congress gave them"