The US government today likes to pretend that it is the perennial champion of political independence for countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain. What is often forgotten, however, is that in the days following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington opposed independence for Soviet republics like Ukraine and the Baltic states.
In fact, the Bush administration openly supported Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to hold the Soviet Union together rather than allow the USSR to decentralize into smaller states. The US regime and its supporters in the press took the position that nationalism—not Soviet despotism—was the real problem for the people of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
Indeed, in the case of Ukraine, President George H.W. Bush even traveled to Kyiv in 1990 to lecture the Ukrainians about the dangers of seeking independence from Moscow, while decrying the supposed nationalist threat.
Today, nationalism is still a favorite bogeyman among Washington establishment mo...
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