Gorbachev Accuses US of Stoking ‘New Cold War’

Mikhail Gorbachev claims that American "triumphalism" is stoking a new Cold War and called for "avid militarists” to stop dragging Europe into conflict, reports the Telegraph.

Gorbachev said there was still time to defuse the standoff between Moscow and the West, as he and his western counterparts had done during the Perestroika period.

“Now there are once again signs of a Cold War,” he said in an interview with Tass, the state-owned Russian news agency. “This process can and must be stopped. After all, we did it in the 1980s. We opted for de-escalation, for the reunification (of Germany). And back then it was a lot tougher than now. So we could do it again.”

Gorbachev said he thought the United States was largely to blame for the confrontation today. “I don’t want to praise our government too much,” he said. “It has also made quite a few errors, but today the danger comes from the American position. They are tortured by triumphalism.”

The Russians appear to be much more rational and eager to find a peaceful solution to current conflicts than the warmongers here in the US.

Remember, though confused about economics, Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union to collapse rather than ordering Russian troops into the neighboring satellite countries to put down protests.

He set this policy from the very start of his rule:

Immediately after the funeral of my predecessor, Cherenko, I called a conference of political leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them clearly that now we were actually going to do what we had for a long time been declaring: we would adhere strictly to the principle of equality and independence, which also included the responsibility of each party for the  development of its own country.

This meant that we would not commit acts of intervention or interference in their internal affairs. My counterparts at  that conference, as I came to understand later, did not take what I said seriously. But I did adhere to this principle and never departed. 

Gorbachev understands clearly what the ramifications of this policy were:

One of the results of free choice in the Warsaw Pact was a development of a "let's get away from Moscow." At the same time this was the decisive impulse behind the disintegration, and ultimately the collapse of the USSR itself. (From: Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism) 

-RW