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.
We elsewhere have agreed that the best settlement is one that recognizes Russia’s entitlement to those parts of Ukraine that the Ukrainians cannot expel them from and that Ukraine in its revised borders should have binding guarantees of its security from Russia and NATO and the prerogatives of any sovereign state. But it is rubbish that the United States in 2014 “provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine” in 2022. The question of how Russia would resolve the status of the “near abroad” of the other former Soviet republics was always going to be complicated and would have to be addressed individually. This continues to be a work in progress.
The United States is in fact attempting to revive the so-called (by William) “strategic ambivalence” over Taiwan, and particularly the agreement between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in 1972 that America accepted the principle of one China and China accepted that reunification would not occur by coercion. The American position is that it is the Chinese who have rattled the status quo and raised the temperature.
Another key point of current disagreement is William’s view that the Hamas invasion of Israel and massacre of over a thousand people, most of them civilians and often in the most ghoulish manner, is just another border incident and that all that needs be done is reestablish the border. It was the worst Jewish bloodbath since the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and Israel rightly took it as an act of war by a puppet entity of Iran, but one which had made it clear that it would never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. In the circumstances, there is no resolution of that problem but to eliminate Hamas as a terrorist operation. The outrages of October 7 confer upon Israel the moral right to do that and the United States certainly has the right to supply some of the sinews of war to Israel in what is essentially an act of pacification, and not “America…fuelling Israel’s horrific war in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The United States could not wait to bring back hundreds of thousands of its servicemen from overseas when the Cold War ended and to leave it to Europe to sort out Europe’s problems. This is what led to the debacle in Yugoslavia and the early European entreaty to the Americans to return. America does not “bridle at the existence of competing values systems,” and as a country that has made a greater effort than any in history to raise up a formerly forcibly servile and subjugated racial minority to absolute equality, American official and public opinion would disparage the “white man’s burden” as scathingly as William does.
As soon as Putin’s insane aggressive war in Ukraine ends, presumably along the lines that William and I and many others have suggested, the United States will be happy to rebuild relations with Russia, which belongs in cordial co-existence with the West and not in the embrace of China. Taiwan seems to be settling down gradually to where Mr. Nixon and the Chinese leadership left it, having made the point that the United States would not acquiesce in an attempted reunification of China by force. As all countries do from time to time, the United States at the moment has a rather inept administration and both the Russians and the Chinese have tried to exploit that fact. These circumstances will change.
The Americans dealt happily with a multipolar world through most of their history. China has not needed the foreign policy of a Great Power for several centuries and is on a learning curve. it is natural that Russia will take a little time to adjust to its somewhat more modest post-Cold War status. I don’t see any reason for William’s pessimism. These are all great nations and they will work it out.
Conrad Black is a historian, author, columnist, financier, and justice reform advocate.
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