Martin LeFevre: Gorbachev’s Old World Order

It’s fascinating how failed leaders are sometimes sainted after they leave office and ruin in their wake. Such is the case with Mikhail Gorbachev.

A recent article by Gorbachev, entitled, “History Is Not Preordained; A New Cold War Can Be Averted,” brings back a painful period in recent history, one with which I was involved. Gorbachev’s essay is self-serving and fatally flawed, an attempt to rewrite the history that he himself was instrumental in carving. www.fountainoflight.net/publish/article_2675.shtml

Gorbachev begins by saying, “US military arrogance has led to a global crisis. But there is still time to change course and build a democratic world order.” He concludes by upholding nationalism, and implicitly applauding Putin’s dismantling of democracy in Russia: “there are no real reasons to fear [Putin’s] Russia…[with] its insistence on protecting its interests, and its ability to play a proper role in the world.”

It’s true that American arrogance has been the primary factor in leading the world into the present global crisis. But it’s absurd to suggest that poor Russia is being faulted for merely protecting its interests and trying to play a proper role in the world.

Gorbachev continues, “When the cold war ended, avenues opened up for progress toward a better world. Major powers, particularly the United States, the Soviet Union and China, were working constructively together in the United Nations Security Council.” (Interesting that he still refers to Russia, even after it collapsed, as the Soviet Union.)

The only thing worse than a lie is a half-truth. Yes, there was a burst of hope for the United Nations after the Cold War ended, but the UN was predestined to falter in the ’90’s, just as it’s predestined to fail in the next decade without taking the next step beyond the UN framework Gorbachev cherishes so much.

Along with several American partners in San Francisco, I started a ‘joint-venture company’ (remember those?) in 1989 with a Russian businessman touted as a leading example of Gorbachev’s perestroika (remember that?). We wanted to “build a new partnership between former superpower enemies.” We obviously failed.

Mindful, in the early spring of 1992, of Mikhail’s upcoming speech in Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill officially marked the beginning of the Cold War with his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in March of 1946, I obtained Gorbachev’s address from a well-placed person we worked with in the USSR. Realizing that Gorbachev’s speech would mark the end of the Cold War almost exactly 46 years later, I outlined our work, and implored him to call for a true world order, beyond the nation-state framework.

The UN system would prove woefully inadequate, we wrote. Many regions, including the former Soviet Union, would undoubtedly suffer more wars stemming from nationalistic passions, unless nationalism could be psychologically and politically addressed. This was before the wars in Chechnya, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, but after the first Gulf War, which set the stage for the former tragedies, for Bush Junior, and for Gulf War II.

Thinking that he probably never received the letter, I forgot about the whole thing until I sat down for lunch one day in the spring of ‘92, and turned on the tube to see Gorbi delivering his speech in Fulton.

Whether he read our letter or not, Gorbachev completely dismissed the vision of a new, non-power-holding body, superseding the UN in principle but complementing it in practice.

Instead he called for greatly strengthening the UN, saying, “I believe that the new world order will not be fully realized unless the United Nations and its Security Council create structures … which are authorized to impose sanctions and make use of other measures of compulsion.” www2.westminster-mo.edu/cm/green_lecture/green_lecture_speech/gorbachev.asp

In the following years, Gorbachev went on to disingenuously underwrite the Earth Charter, and call for a global council of “wise persons…[to] govern and regulate human interaction,” in the words of Jim Garrison, his hand-picked executive director of the Gorbachev Foundation in San Francisco.

In his latest incarnation, Gorbachev says, “A democratic world order is not mere rhetoric. It can be built.” That’s true, but former leaders of failed nation states, who can see no further than the stage the world gives them for their egos, won’t build it. If a Global Polity is for this world, the hands of ordinary human beings must build it.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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