Will Bush ‘Take A Dive’ On Captive Nations Week?

The Center for Security Policy today called upon the Bush Administration to use the occasion of Captive Nations Week (15-21 July 1990) to break with its recent policy of subordinating U.S. government support for the peoples of Captive Nations to the desire to accommodate Mikhail Gorbachev.

There can be little doubt that this policy has set back, rather than advanced, the cause of freedom for nations like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — a cause to which every president since Truman has pledged himself on the occasion of the annual Captive Nations Week. In fact, the absence of American political and economic support and the United States’ refusal to provide leadership for the Western alliance on behalf of the Baltic nations did much to ensure that Soviet economic warfare against Lithuania would ultimately produce the result Moscow desired — the suspension (if not withdrawal) of Vilnius’ declaration of independence.

"Lithuania’s reluctant decision to acquiesce to the Gorbachev policy of coercion did two things," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "First, it enabled Lithuania to gain, for the moment at least, access to Soviet energy and other supplies, albeit at levels far below those required or obtained prior to independence. Second, and probably far more importantly, it enabled Western leaders to consider Germany’s proposals for a Western bail-out of the USSR in London and Houston — without having to confront the inconvenient fact that in so doing they were propping up the Baltic nations’ repressor."

The Center believes that the United States must express solidarity with the oppressed people of the Soviet Union and others being denied political freedom and economic opportunity. This is not simply a moral obligation on the part of the leader of the Free World; it is also the most important source of leverage for genuine structural change wherever authorities — like those in Moscow — continue to resist popular demands for self-determination, true democracy and a free market system.

Accordingly, the Center calls on the Bush Administration to issue a proclamation — as President Bush and his predecessors have done for each of the past fifty years — reflecting the American people’s solidarity with those of the Captive Nations. This year, such a proclamation should also signal the end, at long last, of the Administration’s policy of distancing the United States from those seeking fundamental reform in the USSR and of aligning itself with Gorbachev in his determined effort to preserve the very system that must be displaced.