Читать книгу America's Betrayal Confirmed - Elias Davidsson - Страница 10

Established in 1922, five years after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. On the previous day, 25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, declaring his office extinct. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was preceded by Gorbachev’s unsuccessful attempts to revive the Soviet economy, beginning in May 1985. His liberalization measures led to the emergence from 1986 onwards of nationalist movements and ethnic disputes within the diverse republics of the Soviet Union. On 7 December 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech to the United Nations in which he pledged to cut the Soviet forces in Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

It is not publicly known when exactly the ruling circles of the United States and of the Western Alliance realized that the dissolution of the Soviet bloc was impending. From the time the Soviet Union withdrew its demoralized military forces from Afghanistan (1986), the telltale signs of a deep economic and structural crisis within the Soviet Union were, however, obvious. Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations in December 1988, cited above, left no doubt in Western minds that the Soviet Union was dying.

The impending demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact represented for the U.S. elite and to all those who based their global policies on the paradigm of the Cold War a massive challenge but opened at the same time exciting opportunities for the U.S. to assert its global hegemony.