Conrad Black: The West won the Cold War. Deal with it.

Thanks to William Thorsell for clarifying our disagreement. He either regrets or denies that the West had “won the Cold War.” Of course that cannot be denied as the Soviet Union disintegrated into 15 separate states and, as he acknowledges, international communism collapsed. I cannot believe that he really regrets those events, but he does believe that Russia has a perfect right to attempt to regain much of its former status as the Soviet Union, which had more than twice the population of Russia.

In fact, the West was remarkably gracious and not a bit triumphalist at the end of the Cold War and treated Boris Yeltsin with great respect. But the core of my problem with William is that he believes Russia had a complete right to intervene in Ukraine to promote a Russian annexationist faction over the pro-West European majority of Ukrainians, and that the West, including the United States, had no right to take counter-measures that prevented Ukraine from subserviently reentering the Russian sphere contrary to the wishes of its own people.