William Safire wrote in his column yesterday about the “elder President Bush’s most memorable foreign-policy blunder” — in Kiev in 1991, with the Ukraine then under Communist rule:
With the Soviet Union coming apart, the U.S. president — badly advised by the stability-obsessed "realist" Brent Scowcroft — made a speech urging Ukrainians yearning for independence to beware of "suicidal nationalism." . . .
I dubbed this the "Chicken Kiev" speech. That so infuriated Bush, who mistakenly saw the phrase as imputing cowardice rather than charging colossal misjudgment, that he has not spoken to me since.
Wonder whether Bush 41 is speaking these days to Natan Sharansky. In his new book, Sharansky relates the conversation he had with Bush 41 in 1990, when the two met at the White House to talk about assisting Soviet Jewry:
Our conversation then turned to the larger events taking place at that time in the USSR. The president told me he intended to support Gorbachev’s efforts to keep the Soviet Union together and wanted to hear my opinion on how best to help him.
When I asked why America wanted to prevent the breakup of the USSR, he explained that Gorbachev was a man with whom the United States "could do business."
President Bush also made it clear that he believed dealing with an unelected Soviet leader who could be counted on to preserve stability around the globe was better than taking a chance on a Pandora’s box of international chaos opening up in the wake of the USSR’s collapse.
I respectfully told the president that in my view nothing could or should be done to convince Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians to reject the independence they had craved for so long and which was now finally within their reach. . . .
But President Bush chose a different course. In August 1991, he traveled to the Ukraine where he delivered his notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech . . .
We know that Bush 43 has been talking to Sharansky, as well as reading his book, and that American foreign policy is now focusing on the central role of democracy that Sharansky first tried to impress upon Bush 41.
A good summary of Sharansky’s views can be found in this transcript of his speech last week at the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA, where he spoke to 500 people on "Human Rights, Democracy, and the Middle East." The transcript — like the book — is worth reading in its entirety.
(National Review today begins a three-part serialization of the Introduction to Sharansky’s book).