JRL NEWSWATCH: “To Seek Peace in Ukraine, Remember the End of the Cold War” – The Nation
“U.S.-Russia relations once seemed so promising after the collapse of the USSR. An honest look at how they soured can help us understand today’s conflicts.”
“… Hopes ran high for a new era of cooperation and friendship between the United States and Russia, and in the world more broadly. In my case, as a former journalist in South Asia with a background in colonial and postcolonial studies, such hopes were encouraged by the fact that … the breakup of the Soviet Union was so remarkably peaceful …. With the Ukraine conflict, that happy comparison has come to an end. This brief period was characterized by almost hysterical adulation on both sides. In America, you had ‘Gorbymania’; in Russia, you had the uncritical fetishization of Western and especially American democracy and culture by most of the intelligentsia, and to a lesser extent by the younger population in general. However, the love on both sides was really for simulacra of their own imagining, not the actual countries, and these illusions were shared by leading policymakers and supposed ‘experts’ in both nations ….”