Substack, 10/3/23

A few weeks ago the U.S. Army War College released a paper which was an urgent call for the U.S. armed forces to adapt to the modern style of warfare being innovated in the Ukrainian conflict. [https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3240&context=parameters]

The paper made the rounds due to some startling admissions, which we’ll get to. But what’s most important to understand is that it represents a general shift in thinking that’s propagating throughout the entire sphere of the Atlanticist West, and was released in concert with several other key thinktank pieces and policy shift announcements from the EU, NATO, etc., which holistically represent an internal panic deep within their structures, resulting in an urgent need for a strategy change.

And this point is one of the central themes of the War College paper itself. Its opening preamble can be summarized in a single sentence: the current time period marked by the Ukrainian conflict represents the largest “inflection point” in 50 years of military history. The authors believe that the Yom Kippur War of 1973 was the previous most impactful inflection point. They recount how the U.S. army was demoralized by its experience in Vietnam, and inability to meet its objectives, followed by Israel almost losing to a Soviet-equipped Egypt in the Yom Kippur War.

As a very brief and over-generalized backdrop, though Israel is listed as officially having “won” the Yom Kippur War, Egypt in fact achieved most of its political objectives, which was to seize some land east of the Suez in order to eventually take back the Sinai peninsula, which they did. And although Egypt made huge blunders that caused part of their army to be routed, ultimately the war proved to Israel, the U.S., and allies that the future would be dangerous as the Arabs were getting much stronger, particularly under Soviet backing. In fact, for anyone interested, just purely coincidentally there’s a new article from a week ago in the Jerusalem Post about the irony that years later, Israel views the Yom Kippur War as a somber experience whereas in Egypt it’s celebrated as a grand victory.

Either way, the War College explains that as a result of this inflection period, the U.S. founded TRADOC (United States Army Training and Doctrine Command) school. Which is actually a network of schools tasked with creating new operational doctrines to prepare the U.S. military for future conflicts. In short, they were spooked by the developments of the previous years, and needed a way to “jump ahead” of the competition. This resulted in a series of new doctrines like the AirLand Battle I wrote about at length in this previous dissection of a U.S. internal thinkpiece:…

But this seems to highlight the odd dichotomy: on one hand the entire report, entitled Escalation in the War in Ukraine, appears to go into overdrive in attempting to convince readers and policymakers that Russia is surrounded by a plethora of escalation options, insinuating that it will have no choice but to use one of them as it gets increasingly ‘desperate’ in the war effort. But on the other hand, they admit Russia actually doesn’t see any reason to escalate. [https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2807-1.html]

This leaves us to conclude that the real current course in Western military command centers and thinktank-land revolves around finding further pressure points and ways to make Russia want to escalate in a way that could turn global perception against it, and could justify further NATO intervention of some kind to save Ukraine. In a sense, as I implied before, this report appears more like a handbook or guidebook on how to make Russia give us the casus belli to increase our own provocations and escalations to save a floundering AFU.

What it ultimately highlights is the fact that the West appears greatly irked and peeved by Russia’s stoic, mannered approach to this war. They are beside themselves, and can’t believe that Russia can fight such a devastatingly protracted conflict in so calm and measured a manner, without major political, societal, and economic upheaval to throw them off-kilter and create the ripe groundswell of turmoil which would necessitate an off-balancing “escalation” that would prove a major blunder, and hand the salivating NATO thinktankers an enormous gift.

Thus, in light of this, the West plans to use all possible means to coax Russia into shooting itself in the foot by disproportionately responding to one of the planned provocations they have in store, in order to give raison d’etre for some intervention to save Ukraine. This doesn’t have to be something of maximal proportions yet, like full-on NATO invasion or something like that. No, even the justification of further increased support, or the activation of more lethal strategic weaponry supplied to Ukraine would suffice.

Remember, a major portion—perhaps the biggest one—of the West’s support is convincing their own publics and lawmakers in justifying increasingly more provocative weapons pledges. Even provoking a relatively minor Russian rash response could be used to convince wearying Western populaces in warming to the hand over of things like ATACMS or other items.

Of course, I find all this to be a relatively pointless exercise and strategic dead-end because I don’t think they have much left to hand over that could do anything in changing the now-crystallized trajectory of this conflict. The only other potential pivot I could glean from the Rand document which could conceivably form the axis of a strategy is in the final item on their escalations options list: Option G.

It reads: Ukraine expands its strikes inside Russia. Motivation: Increase domestic political costs for Russian leadership.

That encapsulates just about the only realistic option they have left, and given recent trends it appears to be one of the main thrusts they’re going with. I’m referring to the other big recent provocation, German Bundestag member Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann’s statement that Ukraine has the right to strike Russian territory with German Taurus missiles. Putting the two together, we can only come to the conclusion that the progressive push for Ukraine to strike deeper and deeper into Russian territory has nothing whatever to do with any strategic or military considerations, but rather revolves entirely around Rand’s assessment of “putting political pressure on Russian leadership.”

To wit, they believe that by striking deep into Russia they can cause enough fear, panic, and public distress as to force Russian citizens to begin pressuring the government to end the war, or simply create enough unpopularity as to give Western intel services opportunities to oust key leadership, whether that might be election, overthrow, etc. Unfortunately, this has virtually no chance of having any effect as the Russian public either doesn’t care nor notice any strikes, including the ones to the heart of Moscow, or is simply unified into greater solidarity by them.

Dmitry Medvedev’s “populist” pandering-style response to both the aforementioned provocative announcements likely leaves Western thinktankers with an inkling of hope:

“The number of leadership idiots in NATO countries is growing.

“One newfangled cretin – the British defense minister – has decided to move British training courses for Ukrainian soldiers to the territory of Ukraine itself. That is, to turn their instructors into a legal target for our Armed Forces. Realizing perfectly well that they will be ruthlessly destroyed. And not as mercenaries, but as British NATO specialists.

“Another fool – the head of the Defense Committee of the Federal Republic of Germany with a hard-to-pronounce surname – demands to immediately supply the Khokhobanderites with Taurus missiles, so that the Kiev regime can strike at the territory of Russia to weaken the supply of our army. They say this is in accordance with international law. Well, in that case, strikes on German factories where these missiles are made would also be in full compliance with international law.

“After all, these morons are actively pushing us towards World War III….”

– Medvedev

But alas, ever the stoic practitioner of the ‘long game’, I doubt Putin will give them the uncharacteristic slipup they’re counting on to salvage their disastrous Ukrainian campaign. Painful as it might be for us to take some of the obviously deliberate provocations ‘on the cheek,’ good chance remains that sometime in the future, after Ukraine’s rapid disintegration and subsequent capitulation—perhaps even only a year or two from now—we may recognize, in hindsight, the wisdom of the strategy which staved off nuclear war by way of a methodical, unwavering, and strategically disciplined approach.

Putin says Israel needs to publish satellite evidence that it didn’t bomb Gaza hospital. Link here, embed below.

Israel v. Hezbollah? Link here, embed below.

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, 10/3/23

“What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

These words, written by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 published “The End of History,” an article that turned the academic world upside down.

“Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.”

“A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values. “

But there was a catch. Fukuyama went on to note that, 

“[N]ationalism is currently on the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within the world’s oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.”

Global Model 

This growing nationalism was the poison pill to Fukuyama’s thesis regarding the primacy of liberal democracy. The foundational premise of the then-burgeoning neoconservative philosophical construct of a “new American century” was that liberal democracy, as practiced by the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, would become the model upon which the world would be rebuilt, under American leadership, in the post-Cold War era. 

These paragons of the twisted confluence of capitalism and neoliberalism would have done well to reflect on the words of their arch-nemesis, Karl Marx, who famously observed that,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

E. Capiro’s 1895 oil painting of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the printing house of their German daily Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published in Cologne at the time of the Revolution of 1848-1849. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

History, it seems, can never end, but rather is reincarnated, over and over, from a foundation of history influenced by the actions of the past, infected as they are with the mistakes that are derived from the human condition.

One of the mistakes made by Fukuyama and the proponents of liberal democracy, who embraced his “end of history” ideal in reaching their conclusion, is that the key to historical progression lies not in the future, which has yet to be written, but in the past, which serves as the foundation upon which everything is built.

Historical foundations run deep — deeper than the memories of most academics. There are lessons of the past that reside in the soul of those most impacted by events, both those recorded in writing and those passed down orally from generation to generation. 

Academics such as Fukuyama study the present time, drawing conclusions based upon a shallow understanding of the complexities of times past. 

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According to Fukuyama, history ended with the conclusion of the Cold War, perceived as a decisive victory of the liberal democratic order over its ideological opponent, world communism. 

But what if the collapse of the Soviet Union — the event seen by most historians as signaling the end of the Cold War — wasn’t triggered by the manifestation of the victory over communism by liberal democracy, but rather by the weight of history defined by the consequences of prior “end of history” moments? What if the sins of the fathers were transferred to the progeny of previous historical failures? 

War & Revived Nationalism 

Of the many points of conflict occurring in the world today, one stands out as a manifestation of the ongoing fascination liberal democracy adherents have with the victory over communism, which they thought was won more than three decades ago, namely, the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Political scientists in the Fukuyama “end of history” school view this  conflict as being derived by the resistance of the remnants of Soviet regional hegemony (i.e., modern-day Russia, led by its president, Vladimir Putin) over the inevitability of liberal democracy taking hold.

But a closer examination of the Russian-Ukraine conflict points to the present conflicts being born of not simply the incomplete divorce of Ukraine from the Soviet/Russian orbit that occurred at the end of the Cold War, but also the detritus from the collapse of previous ruling systems, especially the Tsarist Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk map showing territory lost by Bolshevik Russia in 1918. (Department of History, U.S. Military Academy, Public domain)

Indeed, the current conflict in Ukraine has nothing to do with any modern-day manifestation of the Cold War bipolarity, and everything to do with the resurrection of national identities which existed, however imperfectly, centuries before the Cold War even began.

To understand the roots of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, one needs to study  German actions after the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the rise and fall of Symon Petliura and the Polish-Soviet War — all of which predated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the dissection of Galicia that took place in 1939 and 1945. 

These actions were all triggered by the collapse of Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian power, and then united by violent efforts to allow local realities to shape the final disposition of a region frozen in place by the rise of Soviet power.

The dislocation felt by many Ukrainians today from all things Russian can be traced to the failed attempt at forming a nascent Ukrainian nation in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of both Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire – all prior to the consolidation of both Polish and Bolshevik power.

The Brief Rise and Fall of a Ukrainian State, 1918-1921

The Ukrainian People’s Republic, led by the nationalist Symon Petliura, proclaimed its independence from Russia in January 1918. It did so backed the German army, which occupied the Republic after the Central Powers, led by Germany, signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Ukraine in February 1918. (Russia and the Central Powers signed a separate Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918).

The German military occupiers then dissolved the socialist, Ukrainian People’s Republic in April 1918, replacing it with the Ukrainian State, also known as the Second Hetmanate. (The First Hetmanate was a Ukrainian Cossack State that existed in the Zaporizhian region from 1648 until 1764).

Symon Petliura (Wikipedia/Public Domain)

But the Ukrainian State survived only until December 1918, when forces loyal to the deposed Ukrainian People’s Republic, led by Petliura, overthrew the Second Hetmanate, and reclaimed control over Ukraine.

During this time the physical dimensions of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was in constant flux. In the short first tenure of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, two territories claimed as Ukrainian — centered round Odessa and Kharkov — declared their independence from the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and instead opted to join Russia [as four regions today have similarly opted to join Russia]. 

In November 1918 a portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Galician territories possessing a Ukrainian majority declared its independence, organized itself as the Western Ukrainian Republic, and in January 1919 merged with the Ukrainian People’s Republic.

But upon its creation, the Western Ukrainian Republic found itself at war with a newly independent Poland and, following the merger between the Western Ukrainian Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the war morphed into a general conflict between Poland and Ukraine.

One of the major battlegrounds of this conflict was the western Galician territory of Volhynia. It was here that Ukrainian troops undertook the slaughter of thousands of Jews, for which Petliura has been blamed.

End of Ukrainian Republic

The Polish-Ukrainian war ended in December 1919 with the defeat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. One of the major reasons for this defeat was the rise of Soviet power as the Russian Civil War reached its violent conclusions in the territories abutting the Ukrainian People’s Republic, allowing the victorious Red Army to turn its attention to consolidating Bolshevik authority over the territory of Ukraine.

This led to a peace treaty between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Poland which saw the territories of the former Western Ukrainian Republic turned over to Poland in exchange for Polish assistance against the Bolsheviks.

The alliance between Poland and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, concluded in April 1919, led to a Polish offensive against the Soviet Union which ended with the capture of Kiev by Polish troops in May 1919. A Soviet counterattack in June took the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw, only to be thrown back in August by Polish forces, which began to advance eastward until the Soviets sued for peace, in October 1920.

While various efforts to end the Polish-Soviet conflict had been brokered on the basis of a delineation of territory known as the Curzon Line, named after the British Lord who first proposed it back in 1919, the final demarcation of the border was negotiated via the Treaty of Riga, signed in March 1921, which formally ended the Polish-Soviet war.

The so-called “Riga Line” had Poland taking control of large amounts of territory well east of the Curzon Line, leading to longstanding resentment by Soviet authorities.

The Treaty of Riga imposed boundaries on a region with no regard to the ethnic composition of the people living there, leading to a mixing of populations that were inherently hostile toward one another.

The end of the Western Ukrainian Republic, in 1919, led to the political leadership of that entity going into diaspora in Europe, where they pressed the governments of Europe to recognize the independent status of the Western Ukrainian nation.

Rise of Bandera

Stepan Bandera torchlight parade in Kiev, Jan. 1, 2020. (A1/Wikimedia Commons)

This diaspora worked closely with disaffected Ukrainian nationalists who found themselves under Polish governance in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet war. Among these Ukrainian nationalists was Stepan Bandera, an adherent of Symon Petliura (assassinated in exile in Paris in 1926 by Jewish anarchist Sholom Schwartzbard who said he was avenging the deaths of 50,000 Jews. Schwartzbard was acquitted.)

Bandera rose to lead the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1930’s, eventually allying himself with Nazi Germany following the 1939 partitioning of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, which ran roughly along the Curzon Line demarcation.

Bandera was the driving force behind Ukrainian nationalist forces operating alongside the German occupying forces after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. These forces participated in the massacre of Jews in Lvov and Kiev (Babyn Yar) and the slaughter of Poles in Volhynia in 1943-44.

When the Soviet Union and the western allies defeated Germany, the Curzon Line was used to demarcate the border between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, putting the western Ukrainian territories under Soviet control.

Reinhard Gehlen (Bundesarchiv/Wikimedia Commons)

Bandera and hundreds of thousands of western Ukrainian nationalists fled to Germany in 1944, ahead of the advancing Red Army. Bandera continued to maintain contact with tens of thousands of Ukrainian nationalist fighters who remained behind, coordinating their actions as part of a resistance campaign managed by Reinhard Gehlen, a German intelligence officer who ran Foreign Armies East, the German intelligence effort against the Soviet Union.

After the surrender of Nazi Germany, in May 1945, Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East organization was subordinated to U.S. Army intelligence, where it was reorganized into what became the BND, or West German intelligence organization.

The Cold War began in 1947, following the announcement by U.S. President Harry Truman of the so-called Truman Doctrine, which aspired to stop the expansion of Soviet geopolitical expansion.

That same year, the newly created C.I.A. took over management of the Gehlen organization. From 1945 until 1954, the Gehlen organization, at the behest of U.S. and British intelligence, worked with Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to direct the efforts of the Banderist fighters who remained on Soviet territory.

They fought in a conflict that claimed the lives tens of thousands of Soviet Red Army and security personnel, along with hundreds of thousands of OUN and Ukrainian civilians. The C.I.A. continued to fund the OUN in diaspora up until 1990.

Link to Today

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. 

In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was later overthrown. 

More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected.

At the time of the 2014 overthrow of the elected Yanukovych, Western corporate media reported on the essential part the descendants of Petliura and Bandera played in the coup. 

As The New York Times reported, the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.  

The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych.

Thus today’s Ukrainian nationalism draws a direct link to the history of extremist nationalists beginning with the post World War I-period.  

Where Does History Begin?

Almost every discussion about the historical roots of today’s Russian-Ukrainian conflict begins with the partition of Poland in 1939, and the subsequent demarcation that took place at the end of the Second World War, solidified by the advent of the Cold War.

However, anyone searching for a solution to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that is grounded in post-Cold War policies will run afoul of the realities of history that pre-date the Cold War, and which continue to manifest in the present day by reincarnating still unresolved issues.

They all have a precedent that dates to the tumultuous period between 1918-1921.

The reality is that the collapse of the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires had a far greater influence on the history of modern-day Ukraine than did the collapse of the Soviet Union.

History, it seems, will never end. It is folly to think so, with those embracing such a notion simply prolonging and promoting the nightmares of the past, which will forever haunt those who live in the present.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Link here.

By Tarik Cyril Amar, Substack, 10/17/23

Tarik Cyril Amar is an expert on Ukraine and Russia. A historian based in Istanbul and trained at Oxford, the LSE, and Princeton, he speaks both Ukrainian and Russian and has lived in Ukraine for five years.

October 2023 is likely to be remembered as either a historic turning-point or a last chance humanity missed before stumbling into World War Three. Here’s why:

Two important developments are unfolding before our eyes. First, while Israel is committing massive atrocities against Palestinians (especially but not only in Gaza), the United States leads the West in enabling the extreme-right-Zionist settler regime by providing diplomatic cover and arms. While Western publics show some signs of resistance and solidarity with the Palestinian victims of the Israeli massacre, Western governments and media are digging in their heels. Israel may not achieve all its aims, namely the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (and then the West Bank) by genocidal means. But if Israel fails, that failure will be due to Palestinian resistance and, perhaps, intervention from other states in the Middle East. The West will have done its worst, meanwhile, to help Israel win and preserve its total immunity against the claims of international law and elementary ethics.

(“Zeitenwende” Germany, weak as it is, is playing a particularly perverse and revolting role, hiding behind its historic Holocaust guilt to leave Palestinians to their fate at the hand of a genocidal regime. Indeed, many Germans seem to positively enjoy the massacring of Gazans in a manner reminiscent of their parents and grandparents who saw nothing wrong with, for instance, the siege and bombarding of Leningrad. German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” has failed.)

Second, even while making yet another horrific crisis worse, Washington is now backing out of its preceding fiasco, namely its proxy war in Ukraine. And it is America’s fiasco, for two reasons. Concerning how it happened, Russia’s invasion in February 2022 broke international law. Yet Moscow did offer a perfectly viable off-ramp at the end of 2021, and, as the General Secretary of NATO Jens Stoltenberg has now blurted out, the West – of course with Washington calling the shots – knowingly rejected Russia’s offer to negotiate instead of fighting it out. Rather than finally cease to provoke Moscow by deliberately infringing on its elementary security interests, the USA decided to go for broke.

Then, apart from the causes of the war, there is the outcome: That as well is a fiasco for the West, because Russia is winning. Whereas a compromise in 2021 would have left the status quo intact, the defeat of Ukraine and its Western backers will greatly damage the Western position overall: The West has done its worst to Russia, and it has not been enough. Now Moscow knows how strong it really is, and it also knows how weak the West really is. And the rest of the world knows, too. This defeat will not be like the Western rout in Kabul, grotesque as that was. This one the West will not just be able to walk away from. This one will hurt and keep hurting.

These two Western failures, over Ukraine and Palestine, have three features in common. They confirm the USA’s “leadership” in the sense that the West – i.e., most of Europe, NATO, and the EU, plus several odd cases such as Canada or Japan – obey Washington’s orders, often with sickening enthusiasm. They also show that this “leadership” is now severely circumscribed: No one outside this “West” is going along anymore, and insofar as they do, then only out of a fear that is diminishing rapidly. And finally, and most importantly, both failures ultimately stem from the USA’s shortsighted refusal to adjust to the fact that its post-Cold War “unipolar moment” is over and that it will now have to find a place as one important but no longer dominant state among others.

Washington 2023 is, in other words, radically different from Moscow 1986. Back then, the still powerful yet crisis-ridden Soviet Union was not merely ready but took the initiative to end the Cold War with a compromise instead of a hot war. Indeed, within less than a decade, the Soviets would acquiesce not only to the loss of superpower status but of their whole state. Whatever you think about Soviet history, the Soviets lost their empire peacefully and reasonably and at great cost. They did not have to. They could have fought and taken us all with them.

The American empire in decline is very different. This is not the place for analyzing why. For that, things are too urgent. What we must do now is face the fact that Washington’s “elites” are very likely to fight and fight again – and then some more – to prevent the inevitable, the end of their global power. That is why we need to think beyond multipolarity even now. Valdimir Putin and Xi Jinping are correct when they tell us that a multipolar world order is emerging whether Washington likes it or not.

Yet the real danger is that, instead of finding its place in that new world order, the USA will keep provoking, instigating, and starting wars, until we finally reach one, big overarching cataclysm. The only way to prevent this is to contain and deter Washington. Those states who understand that the survival of humanity is more important than the “Manifest-Destiny” and “Indispensability” delusions of the USA will have to do more than just bypassing Washington. They will have to form a global coalition to threaten it into accepting its decline no less peacefully than the Soviets had to accept theirs.