Jennifer Loven reports here on a speech made by President Bush over the weekend in Latvia. Looking beyond obvious lines that I imagine would lead many Americans to cringe - say, that the US is willing to commit the lives of its own people to defend freedom in Latvia (whatever that means - I'm guessing just Latvian sovereignty, which of course may or may not be particularly "free"), or, and I find this particularly unsettling, "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations — appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability" (emphasis mine) - more and more these extremely idealistic sentiments make me wonder about the president's grasp of history. Does he think FDR and Churchill turned over the Baltics and Poland to Stalin with a hearty slap on the back and giant piles of cash for his trouble? There were perfectly good reasons (though they can certainly be debated) for why the US and the UK did what they did back then. For example, in the case of Poland, the exiled leaders were disorganized, intransigent and often unhelpful to their own cause, and the US was still seeking Soviet support to fight Nazis and the Japanese. And of course there was a gigantic Soviet army in these places that we would like to have seen "free".
I'm not anti-freedom, and I'm pleased he's pushing for change in Belarus. But his lofty speeches about amorphous goals make me wonder about about what he's going to lead us through in the next 3 years. "Freedom" can mean many things to many peoples, and stability isn't necessarily such a bad thing.
Posted by armand at May 10, 2005 11:59 AM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs