Gorbachev: Putting a Stop to the New Cold War

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26884-focus-putting-a-stop-to-the-new-cold-war

Speaking at a symposium celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 83-year-old Gorbachev may seem yesterday’s man. He is, after all, the last president of the Soviet Union before it fell apart, while Russia has now morphed into the corrupt oligarchic capitalism of Vladimir Putin, with his new-found religiosity, idiotic gay-bashing, and ultra-rightwing nationalism.

In today’s Russia, Gorby remains a prophet without honor in his own country, where members of parliament have called on their government to prosecute him for treason for having sold out to the NATO allies. By contrast, many in the West still admire him for his glasnost and perestroika reforms at home, for respecting the independence of his Eastern European satellites, and for helping end the first Cold War without major bloodshed.

But few Western leaders - including Obama, the Clintons, and the Bushes - will find comfort in what Gorbachev is now saying. That is, if they bother to hear him out, which his fellow Nobel laureate in the White House seems unlikely to do.

“The end of the Cold War was just the beginning of the path towards a new Europe and a safer world order,” said Gorbachev. “But, instead of building new mechanisms and institutions of European security and pursuing a major demilitarization of European politics – as promised, incidentally, in NATO's London Declaration – the West, and particularly the United States, declared victory in the Cold War. Euphoria and triumphalism went to the heads of Western leaders. Taking advantage of Russia's weakening and the lack of a counterweight, they claimed monopoly leadership and domination in the world.”

He specifically cited the expansion of NATO, the development of an anti-ballistic missile system, military interventions in Yugoslavia and Iraq, the West-backed secession of Kosovo, the crisis in Syria, and the standoff over Ukraine, which he called a “blister turning into a bleeding, festering wound.”