Gorbachev assails Western ''superiority complex''

By BONNIE PFISTER, The Associated Press

Both superpowers worked to end the Cold War, but U.S. hubris is not good for international peace and stability, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said Monday.
Speaking at Sovereign Bank Arena, Gorbachev said perestroika, or restructuring, was needed not just in 1980s Moscow but in the minds and approaches of today's Western leaders.
"We saw a complex of victory, particularly in the United States, and that superiority complex has affected very negatively Western policies," Gorbachev said.
Speaking through an interpreter, Gorbachev said the United States faces decisions about its "model of leadership" as serious as those of the mid-1980s.
"Will it be a leadership of domination, or will it be leadership through partnership?" he said. "I ask you, American people, do you want to be a global policeman?"
The 74-year-old Nobel laureate has been speaking around the United States for the past week, variously calling for greater efforts against poverty and increased business cooperation among U.S. and Russian high-tech companies.
Gorbachev led the Soviet Union for six years until its 1991 collapse, caused in large part by the democratic reforms he ushered in. He later founded Green Cross International to encourage business, government and non-governmental organizations to collaborate on solutions to environmental problems.

He was scheduled to speak Tuesday at Seton Hall University. In New York on Thursday, Gorbachev is to call for a first-ever international water treaty during a keynote address to the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development. That would be his first speech to the United Nations since his December 1988 address announcing dramatic reductions of the Soviet military in Eastern Europe.
In Monday's hour-long speech and an earlier press conference, Gorbachev mentioned President George W. Bush by name only in passing, praising the dialogue between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But had harsh words for leaders he said want quick and easy solutions "using old methods, using force." Diplomacy should not be underestimated, he said, nor civil society disrespected.
"People all over the world, including many people in this country, protested against war in Iraq. They said that you have to respect international bodies," he said.
"You cannot be democratic within your own country whereas you act according to the law of the jungle in the rest of the world," he said, to applause from the nearly 1,500 business people and students in the audience.
He also criticized his successor, Boris Yeltsin, for allowing "wild capitalism" and cronyism to thrive, rather than more gradually evolving from socialism to an open economy.

Calkins Media, April 18, 2005