Ten Years On

The United States was not eager to see Ukrainian independence. Recall the so-called Chicken Kiev speech by President Bush the Elder when he said that even the Ukrainian emigration did not want it, for which he earned much deserved low esteem from those quarters. Then there was the never officially stated but widely believed doctrine that should the Soviet Union break up, a hungry Russia would be confronted by presumably hostile food-surplus states, some with nuclear weapons, and this would lead to instability. This, thankfully, did not happen, and when Ukraine gave up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, it briefly won a place as the darling of Washington policy makers and the third largest recipient of US aid after Israel and Egypt. This changed, of course, when Washington saw that most of the aid was simply being stolen without doing the country any good, but the prospects remain. The United States wants to see a stable Ukraine able to take its rightful place in Europe and stands ready to assist the process when in sees something worth helping along.

Ten years of US-Ukrainian relations can be seen as years of lost opportunities. On the one hand, the US simply failed to understand that the emergence of the newly independent states did not mean new independent states: these were formerly existing states that simply became independent. They changed flags, national anthems, and ideologies, but basically retained the same people doing as close as possible to the same things within the framework of the same (often renamed) structures. Isolated from the intellectual discourse of the outside world since roughly 1928, Ukraine often failed to understand what was expected from it or what it needed to do in order to adapt to the First World economy and way of doing things politically. Ukraine has made progress, but far from enough. The world has made some progress in understanding just how heavy a burden countries like Ukraine still have to bear. I have criticized much in Ukraine and will undoubtedly do so in the future, but one thing I cannot criticize is the basic worth of this country and its people. The West is beginning to focus less on the state and more on the people, doing whatever it can to help create a critical mass of those who know what should be done and are ready and able to do it. God grant all aid to this.