Dear Mr Gorbachev,
Thank you for supporting us after this terrorist attack. In a terrified world, your calm voice brings reassurance. Together with our country you brought down the Berlin Wall. May your voice now help to bring down the wall of terrorism erected between a free people and freedom itself.
I well remember what a hard time you had when the Soviet Union was transitioning to democratic rule and a democratic economy. I tried then to find out as much as I could about the Peacemaker from Russia! You have been and will always remain a source of inspiration for all of us who have lived through this terrible tragedy. No doubt, the grief will pass. Life will go on. With the help of such statesmen as yourself we will be able to come together in solidarity to fight the evil that threatens all of us. Long live Mikhail Gorbachev!
Your sincere and warm words of sympathy and solidarity really touched me and my family. When we remember the history of relations between our countries and how they changed, your words give me hope. Mankind will come to a brighter future if we set aside our differences and jointly get round to resolving the problems that overshadow our lives today. Thank you once again for your support and sympathy. You truly embody those supreme ideals with which people associate the Nobel Peace Prize.
Thank you, Mr Gorbachev. My childhood was during the years of the Cold War. I remember how we feared the Russians. Thanks to you I came to understand that people are always afraid of the unknown when they are worried about what is most important and precious to them, their family and friends. All people, whatever their nationality or religion, want to live in peace and want a good life for their loved ones. You embody that aspiration. Thank you for that.
The fact that seemingly impregnable America had been struck right in its heart demonstrated clearly that nobody in the world is now invulnerable; anyone can become the victim of terror. The sense of sympathy and solidarity felt by most people around the globe was entirely natural. It was natural too that America’s call for an international anti-terrorist coalition was positively received. The world witnessed something quite unprecedented: a common agreement between America, Russia, Europe, India, China, Cuba, the greater part of the Islamic world, and other regions and countries. This happened despite all the serious differences dividing them. Unique in modern history, it resembled the coalition against Hitler during the Second World War.
The first foreign leader to phone George W. Bush to express support and solidarity with stricken America was Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Announcing that he was joining the anti-terrorist coalition, President Putin began cooperating in the fight against terrorism. I fully supported him, believing that at this moment we needed to put aside the irritants that had been bedevilling Russian–American relations recently. I said as much in an interview for Larry King on a satellite link-up between Moscow and the United States. I added, ‘It is very important now to do nothing to undermine the coalition, but rather to transform it into a means for creating a new, peaceful and just world order.’
In an article published in dozens of newspapers in different countries, I developed the idea of a coalition for a new world order.
We cannot again, as in the 1990s, miss the opportunity to build such an order. It is a sad fact that such ideas as solidarity and cooperation with third world countries to overcome poverty and backwardness have disappeared from political discourse. Putting these issues back on the agenda is a means of bringing together countries and peoples with different cultures and on different levels of economic and political development.
If the fight against terrorism comes down only to the exercise of violence, the world will lose out. If it is part of our joint efforts to build a just world order, everyone will be the winner.
Russia has joined the anti-terror coalition not just in words but in deeds: she extended real help to America from the outset of the UN-sanctioned military action in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime, sharing intelligence, coordinating her stance with that of the West and her neighbours, affording the right to overfly Russian territory, providing humanitarian assistance to the Afghan population and arms to the Northern Alliance. Following up on this, the Russian president took such unilateral steps to accommodate the US as closing down the electronic surveillance centre in Cuba and our naval base in Vietnam.
Not everybody in the Russian elite and the country was happy with this policy. Some were still stuck in the categories of the old thinking, others sincerely questioned whether it was right for the most powerful country in the world to be bombing impoverished Afghanistan. Others again muttered that here we were supporting America in its hour of need, but would it reciprocate on issues of importance to us?
In my article, I urged that these questions should not simply be dismissed.
Russia, I have no doubt, will be a major partner in the fight against international terrorism, but no less important is that her views should be taken into account in the building of a new world order. Such irritants in Russo–American relations as the expansion of NATO and the anti-missile defence issue, and many other problems not only between Russia and America, will be more easily resolved if there is a shared overall strategy of moving towards a new global community.
As time passed, however, I and those hoping for a far-reaching change of direction in world politics began to have doubts. Would the coalition survive? Would those who were partners in it stick to the principle of collective action in the fight against the global threats facing mankind?
These doubts grew as the military action against Afghanistan became increasingly protracted, making it clear that the hope of rapid success was fading. Increasingly, the talk was of extending the military action in time and space. The longer the war, the more difficult it would become to maintain the unity of the grand coalition, I warned in an article in November 2001. It might come to grief because of political and geopolitical policies designed to satisfy the ambitions of regional leaders, or because of other interests. Or, indeed, because of an attempt, under the guise of combating terrorism, to gain greater control over other states and expand spheres of influence. It seemed to me important to analyse the underlying causes and consequences of the September 11 disaster. In the same article I wrote:
September 11 marked the end of the ideology of a unipolar world, a turning point that also marked the end of ‘unilateral globalization’. I think it is a tragic date, burying a philosophy born after the ending of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
A whole decade had been lost.
The celebrations over the death of communism went on rather too long and caused people to lose sight of the complexity of the world with all its problems and contradictions. People forgot about poverty and underdevelopment. They forgot about the need to construct a new world order, fairer than the one we had left behind.
Again and again, I urged that the fight against terrorism should not be reduced to a purely military response, and in particular that it should not be used as cover for promoting purely selfish interests. Gradually, however, my worst fears proved only too well founded.