Who Lost Russia?

“Can we blame the Russians for being angry?”

by Patrick J. Buchanan

By 1988, Ronald Reagan, who had famously branded the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” was striding through Red Square arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev. Russians were pounding both men on the back.

They had just signed the greatest arms-reduction agreement in history – eliminating all Soviet SS-20s targeted on Europe, in return for removal of the Pershing and cruise missiles Reagan had deployed in Europe.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” wrote Wordsworth about his first hearing the news of the fall of the Bastille.

Many of us felt that way then. Within three years, the Berlin Wall had come down, the puppet regimes of Eastern Europe had been swept away, Germany was reunited, the Red Army had gone home, the Soviet Empire had vanished, and the Soviet Union had broken up into 15 nations. The Baltic republics were free. Ukraine was free.

Yet, on the eve of the G-8 summit, Vladimir Putin has announced that Russia will retarget missiles on NATO. We must, he said, counter Bush’s decision to put anti-missile missiles in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic. Why are we doing this?

The United States says the ABM system in Europe is to defend against an Iranian attack. But Tehran has no atom bomb and no ICBM.

We appear to be headed for a second Cold War – and, if we are, responsibility will not fully rest with the Kremlin. For among those who have mismanaged the relationship are presidents Clinton and Bush II, the baby boomers who appear to have kicked away the fruits of a Cold War victory won by their Greatest Generation predecessors.

How did they do it?

http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=11077

2007-06-05