Three years afterward Georgia H. W. Bush, even a year after Operation Desert Storm, became only the third American president since the 1800s to lose a reelection bid.
Four years after that Mikhail Gorbachev ran for the Russian presidency and received 0.5% of the vote.
In his last race for the Polish presidency in 2000 Lech Walesa, when his nation' electorate had finally seen through him, got 1% of the vote.
But he and fellow Cold War heroes of the West march ever onward in confronting Russia during the current phase of the new conflict.
In July, in what they titled An Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe, old/new Cold War champions like Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Valdas Adamkus, Alexander Kwasniewski and Vaira Vike-Freiberga -- Adamkus lived for several decades in the U.S. and Vike-Freiberga in Canada -- ratcheted up anti-Russian rhetoric to a pitch not heard since the Reagan administration.
Their comments included:
"We have worked to reciprocate and make this relationship a two-way street. We are Atlanticist voices within NATO and the EU. Our nations have been engaged alongside the United States in the Balkans, Iraq, and today in Afghanistan. [S]torm clouds are starting to gather on the foreign policy horizon."
"Our hopes that relations with Russia would improve and that Moscow would finally fully accept our complete sovereignty and independence after joining NATO and the EU have not been fulfilled. Instead, Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods."
"The danger is that Russia's creeping intimidation and influence-peddling in the region could over time lead to a de facto neutralization of the region."
"Our region suffered when the United States succumbed to "realism' at Yalta. And it benefited when the United States used its power to fight for principle. That was critical during the Cold War and in opening the doors of NATO. Had a "realist' view prevailed in the early 1990s, we would not be in NATO today"."
"[W]e need a renaissance of NATO as the most important security link between the United States and Europe. It is the only credible hard power security guarantee we have. NATO must reconfirm its core function of collective defense even while we adapt to the new threats of the 21st century. A key factor in our ability to participate in NATO's expeditionary missions overseas is the belief that we are secure at home." [26]
The collective missive also resoundingly endorsed U.S. interceptor missile plans for Eastern Europe and held up the Georgia of Mikheil Saakashvili (another former U.S. resident) as the cause celebre for a new confrontation with Russia.
On September 22 Britain's Guardian published a similar group Open Letter, this one from Vaclav Havel, Valdas Adamkus, Mart Laar, Vytautas Landsbergis, Otto de Habsbourg, Daniel Cohn Bendit, Timothy Garton Ash, André Glucksmann, Mark Leonard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adam Michnik and Josep Ramoneda, called Europe must stand up for Georgia, which featured these topical allusions ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II and the twentieth of the demise of the Berlin Wall:
"As Europe remembers the shame of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939 and the Munich agreement of 1938, and as it prepares to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall and the iron curtain in 1989, one question arises in our minds: Have we learned the lessons of history?"
"Twenty years after the emancipation of half of the continent, a new wall is being built in Europe -- this time across the sovereign territory of Georgia."
"[W]e urge the EU's 27 democratic leaders to define a proactive strategy to help Georgia peacefully regain its territorial integrity and obtain the withdrawal of Russian forces illegally stationed on Georgian soil".[I]t is essential that the EU and its member states send a clear and unequivocal message to the current leadership in Russia." [27]
