In These New Times

A desperate letter from a remote imperial outpost receives a less than sympathetic reception in certain quarters in the imperial heartland

Justin Raimundo

antiwar.com

24th July, 2009

An “open letter” from the ghosts of the cold war begs for an appropriate response

With the end of the cold war, and the implosion of the Soviet empire, one would have thought the entanglements engendered by half a century of US-Russian hostility would have ended. One would, unfortunately, be quite wrong. It wasn’t enough that we nurtured and emboldened the resistance movements in Central and Eastern Europe: it wasn’t enough that we helped the newly-freed “captive nations” throw off their chains, and enter the international scene as fully-fledged political and economic entities – oh no. There was more to come.

As the Berlin Wall was falling, and West Germany moved toward unification with its truncated Eastern half, George Herbert Walker Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev came to an understanding: the Russians would let the Germans go provided Moscow received assurances that NATO would not expand to include the former Russian satellites. However, the military-industrial complex in the US had other plans, and it wasn’t long before NATO expansion was endorsed by both major parties in the US, and the former nations of the Warsaw Pact switched allegiances, entering NATO nearly en masse.

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