Behold!
At the December 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush confirmed that the ideological basis for the war was gone, stating that the two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies. ...
Because the collapse of the Soviet Union happened so soon afterward, people often confuse it with the end of the Cold War. But they were separate events, and the former was not an inevitable outcome of the latter.
Moreover, the breakup of the U.S.S.R. into 15 separate countries was not something the United States caused or wanted. We hoped that Gorbachev would forge a voluntary union of Soviet republics, minus the three Baltic countries. ...
Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, Gorbachev maintained that “the end of the Cold War is our common victory.” Yet the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser.
Sit down, now. I know this is hard to believe. But that author thinks the Crimea Crisis is our fault:
The sad fact is that the cycle of dismissive actions by the United States met by overreactions by Russia has so poisoned the relationship that the sort of quiet diplomacy used to end the Cold War was impossible when the crisis in Ukraine burst upon the world’s consciousness. It’s why 43 percent of Russians are ready to believe that Western actions are behind the crisis and that Russia is under siege.
Wow. That's a whole lot of confused in one article.
Look. We won the Cold War. The Soviet Union lost it. That was a good thing.
That we decided not to rub Moscow's nose in their defeat after they lost the Warsaw Pact was a kindness to make sure that the loss of empire by a nuclear-armed nutball state went smoothly.
And while the end of the Cold War could be put at 1989, I put it at 1991. Despite the loss of their Eastern European provinces, if the Soviet Union had endured the shaky period after, the Communists might have resumed the Cold War as they regained strength.
Again, not wanting the break-up of the Soviet Union was a product of not wanting a nuclear-armed defeated power to lash out with that power to destroy the world. Are Western caution and soft words to be twisted into the notion that the Soviet Union voluntarily ended the Cold War?
Further, stripping the Soviet Union of the Baltic States was a breakup of the Soviet Union. Does the author really think that the Russians wouldn't treat our support for Baltic state independence as the breakup of the Soviet Union if Moscow had held the rest of their continental empire?
And the Soviet Union (and even just post-USSR Russia) was an empire even if it didn't look like the overseas empires of Britain and France. Being contiguous by land did not negate the conquest of foreign peoples. Why was decolonization by everyone in Europe but Russia a good thing, eh?
Yet while Gorbachev was right that the defeat of Soviet communism was our common victory, the Russians changed their mind about that common enemy--or at least Putin did and bent opinion to his opinion.
Russia had the opportunity to rid themselves of their Communist legacy, cement that joint victory, and join the West.
But they did not--and we could not confront and defeat their evil past for them--and now the Russians pine for Soviet glories. Putin is on record as saying the demise of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
That path is Russia's fault and not our fault. We honestly didn't give much of a damn about them after the USSR went belly up and their military eroded. Did they not notice that we were busy with Islamist nutballs after September 11, 2001? We just didn't give a rip about them. Did they not notice that NATO Europe pretty much disarmed after the Berlin Wall crashed down? They just didn't think of Russia as a threat. Yet the Russians continued to be effing nutball bastards, going off about NATO plots to defeat them, until we had to notice.
So now Russia is getting their deepest wish--we take them seriously again. Russia treated us as their main enemy even when we hardly noticed them, and now that they've hit Ukraine after their drive by on Georgia, we have to treat them as a threat to peace again.
Way to go, Putin. Winning!
The problem isn't that we treated the Russians as the losers. Who can doubt the obvious fact that the Soviets lost? The Russians could have been winners by embracing the defeat of the Soviet losers rather than regretting that defeat.
The problem is that we didn't treat them as defeated. There was no de-Communization after 1991 as there was de-Nazification after 1945. And as the years went by, the Russians convinced themselves that they'd been stabbed in the back by their "co-winners," the United States. And writers like Jack Matlock, Jr., buy into the foolish fantasy and basically excuse Putin's aggression as understandable if not admirable. If only we'd been nicer to them, they say. Good grief.
And reading the comments in that piece is just amazing. We defeat a bloody, evil regime, yet somehow we're the bully responsible for the fact that Russia is trying to resurrect the Soviet empire?
Did I wake up today in Bizarro World?
It makes me wish I still had my old t-shirt that I wore around Ann Arbor in the early 1980s. It had a red map of the Soviet Union with a missile plunging in to Moscow, titled "Support First Strike." I didn't really want to wage nuclear war. But I was tired of people pretending that the Soviets weren't an evil empire. I was tired of the moral equivalence arguments that asserted we were just as bad as the Soviets. Now we know Putin has decided he wants to restore the evil empire. He has a weak hand, but now we know his intent.
Although right now I'm more angry with the West's best and brightest who can blame America for the gulag with a UN seat that the Soviet Union was and which Russia is becoming under Putin.
We have to play this smart. I don't think Russia is worthy of a full-blown Cold War as our response. They're too weak for us to have to focus on them as the core of our foreign policy. And they don't have an ideological component that makes them a global problem.
But let's not be confused over who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Putin is a bad guy. Period.
