The University of Texas at Austin Tuesday evening. During the event, which was part of the Harry Middleton Lecture Series, Gorbachev urged the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the formation of a New World Order.

Former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev urged the United States to pull out of Afghanistan and work with Russia and other countries to create a new world order in a lecture at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Tuesday night.

Gorbachev spoke as a part of the Harry Middleton Lectureship series, an initiative by the LBJ Foundation to expose students to high profile speakers. He gave his thoughts on Iran, Afghanistan and Barack Obama. When asked about Russia’s current political state, Gorbachev said he thinks current Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin should not run for athird term as president. Putin served as president of Russia from 2000 to 2008 and has remained as prime minister.

Gorbachev said Putin inherited a very difficult situation from former president Boris Yeltsin and implemented an extreme authoritarian style of government as his way of addressing the needs of the nation. It was perhaps understandable that Putin used certain authoritarian styles in his leadership because of political and economic unrest, Gorbachev said, but using authoritarian methods in general is wrong.

“Whenever you have leaders that rule 20 years or more, the only thing important to those leaders is holding on to power,” Gorbachev said.

Although Gorbachev said he does not make it a habit to give advice to other countries, he said the U.S. should learn from the mistakes of countries