Dawn of an Old Order

REMEMBER the days when the United States supported Third World regimes whose leaders unctuously proclaimed the ideals of Western democracy while plundering their countries and brutalizing their people? With the end of the Cold War, the sight of U.S. Presidents shaking hands with glorified torturers was supposed to be a thing of the past. The Great Game against the West’s Soviet rival had justified supporting our “sons of bitches” against theirs. In the new dawn, the age of Machiavellian compromise was supposed to have passed as the United States stepped forward as the patron of the democracies emerging from the ruins of Communism.

Now the fairy-tale bloodless end of Communism is turning sour. Across the old Soviet Union, all but one (Estonia) of the independent republics has an ex-Communist as its president. A quiet restoration of the old elite has been going on despite all the chatter about democracy and the transition to a free market. That is bad enough for the long-term prospects for democracy or capitalism, but worse is that, in each struggle for power between local anti-Communists and Moscow’s man, Americans and Western Europe have sided with the Party hack.

MA

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Mark Almond

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REMEMBER the days when the United States supported Third World regimes whose leaders unctuously proclaimed the ideals of Western democracy while plundering their countries and brutalizing their people? With the end of the Cold War, the sight of U.S. Presidents shaking hands with glorified torturers was supposed to be a thing of the past. The Great Game against the West’s Soviet rival had justified supporting our “sons of bitches” against theirs. In the new dawn, the age of Machiavellian compromise was supposed to have passed as the United States stepped forward as the patron of the democracies emerging from the ruins of Communism.

Now the fairy-tale bloodless end of Communism is turning sour. Across the old Soviet Union, all but one (Estonia) of the independent republics has an ex-Communist as its president. A quiet restoration of the old elite has been going on despite all the chatter about democracy and the transition to a free market. That is bad enough for the long-term prospects for democracy or capitalism, but worse is that, in each struggle for power between local anti-Communists and Moscow’s man, Americans and Western Europe have sided with the Party hack.