Writing in the Hong Kong-based Asia Times, James Carden remembers George H.W. Bush’s 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.
Carden claims Bush “got it right” when he vowed to keep the U.S. out of conflicts between Russia and its various USSR-era de facto colonies like Ukraine. And that all subsequent U.S. leaders who were encouraging and supportive of places like Latvia and Ukraine were therefore wrong.
I have problems with Carden’s argument on several levels. First, anything based in today’s Hong Kong must be viewed as heavily influenced by Beijing, the column’s acceptance meaning his view is okay with the CCP.
At a more substantive level, the USSR must be viewed as a failed Russian colonial empire during which ethnic Russians migrated to and became residents of many of the colonial possessions. That de facto empire fell apart in the early 1990s, supposedly ‘stranding’ said Russians in now-independent countries with local majorities.
When the British empire fell apart at the end of World War II, the colonial Brits who wanted to live as Brits went home, or migrated to places (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) that would provide a reasonable facsimile of British life. Those who stayed behind in places like India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and South Africa understood they would have to accommodate to the local majority culture.
For some this worked out okay, for others not so much. And the process wasn’t so very different for colonials in the former empires of Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy.
Why should the rules for “left behind” colonial Russians in the Baltics, and other former SSRs be different? V. Putin has nominated himself as their “protector” meaning he will intervene to support their “rights” to continue to function as full-fledged Russians wherever they live.
Putin needs to hear from us and from former colonial powers in the EU that “end of empire” doesn’t work that way. And mostly he has heard exactly that, and rejected it. In the column linked to above, Carden defends Putin’s choice and, like Putin, is simply and profoundly wrong.
Afterthought: At the macro level, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are supposed to be defining characteristics of the past 80 years. In the face of which Putin is trying to reassemble the Tsar's Russian Empire. Where is the outrage?
