General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What is the "hard left"? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)And really, the U.S. should never have preferred Yeltsin over Gorbachev. Gorbachev had done everything we ever asked and all we gave him and his country in repayment was humiliation. We destroyed both of those men and gained nothing worthwhile in doing so.
It's extremely unlikely that Yeltsin would have chosen Putin to succeed him if the U.S. hadn't spent Yeltsin's entire term putting him in his place and making a show of pushing him around, after doing the same to Gorbachev.
There was no reason to treat post-1991 Russia more harshly than we treated post-1945 Germany-or to insist that they play the role of the vanquished nation. And people all over the world, particularly democrats, LGBTQ people and women in Russia, are paying the price for our shortsidedness.
We should have let it go at saying the Cold War was done. We didn't have to make an arrogant display of claiming victory. "Victory" was a meaningles term in that conflict.