Help or Interference?

Not having read Mark MacKinnon’s The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics, I can only comment on Paul Wilson’s review of it (“Help or Interference?,” September 2007). Wilson says “the desire for change … was not something cooked up in Washington: it was already there” and this is the most important point. Democratic or institutional development will only result from groups and even individuals who want change, recognize it is possible, and are prepared to make the commitment and sacrifice to make it happen. As well there must be a society that is anxious or at least prepared to change how it governs itself. Having real elections, a free media, honest judges and cops, a working legislature, human rights and freedom of speech are seen by most as a measure of democracy, but for established powers and elites they are a threat.

For eleven years I worked for a leading American democratic development non-governmental organization, the National Democratic Institute, most often funded by the U.S. government. I worked for NDI in nine of the republics of the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan. Never once was I told or asked to promote any agenda other than supporting activists who wanted to create a better society through the creation of viable institutions that reflect the basic principle of human rights and democracy. Never once did my agenda differ from those of my partners except perhaps in those same parameters. I won’t say it does not happen but it is very much the exception, not the rule.

Ross Reid
St. John’s, Newfoundland

When I wrote this book, I knew that along with the good ones, there would be reviews like Paul Wilson’s.

The New Cold War, I believe, ruffles some feathers because it challenges the perception that the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are captives waiting for the good guys in America and the West to free them. While that may have been true at the end of the first Cold War, the people who live in Russia and the other former republics of the old USSR now have far more complex feelings about “freedom,” “democracy” and the West having lived through the chaos and economic deprivation of the 1990s.

In writing this I sought to look beyond the media coverage of the time (including my own) and to examine why the seemingly spontaneous uprisings on the streets of Belgrade, Tbilisi and Kiev were at the same time so smoothly orchestrated, well funded and incredibly similar to each other.

The intent of my book is not to take anything away from the brave people who stood on the streets in Ukraine—or any of the revolutions before that, including the 1989 Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia—but to try to plot these events on the grand chessboard that policy makers on both sides play on.

Why did the Bush administration suddenly decide that Georgia’s 2003 parliamentary election was of such importance? Why didn’t the same concern exist when U.S.-friendly regimes openly rigged votes in the nearby former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan? Were American-backed NGOs really interested in furthering democracy or in promoting candidates and parties with a specific, pro-U.S. worldview? The answers don’t always fit the America-good, Russia-bad paradigm that Mr. Wilson apparently subscribes to.

That said, this is not a book the Kremlin will like either. It is as much a lament for the dangerous slide Russia has taken under Putin as it is an investigation of what American-funded NGOs are up to in the region. I’m no fan of Putin or Putinism, although I probably wouldn’t go as far as to compare Russia now to Germany in the 1930s as the evidence doesn’t yet support such hyperbole.

The New Cold War is the story of how we lost the hope and trust that existed in the early 1990s and how we got to now, with the Kremlin and the White House each looking at the other as a nuclear-armed adversary again.

Mark MacKinnon
Jerusalem