Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
... Further, the lack of direction was fed by a lack of intelligence (apparently). Those understandable things were compounded by a lack of vision and the old American ego; "Nana-nana nana -- we won!"

It would have been in our interest to help because that may have precluded the oligarchy turning into government by KGB.
Yes, with caveats. We should have concentrated on trade and opening treaty relations, doing things like giving them mutual passport recognition a la Europe to build bridges. There is an excellent book about the time. "Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe" by Wedel.

I'd say it was compounded by academia churning out Russian Studies doctorates who got ahead by quoting each other. Very few spent more than a few days or weeks in the USSR (highly supervised) if that. The fate of Russia was sealed by Clinton's decision to let academia loose to test their theories, as in "Shock Treatment" and giving the field to the 5-Star aid contractors.

In fact, the amount of aid loans and the way they were given were worse than nothing at all. Imagine what would happen in the USA if a nation came in and handed out unsecured loans starting at $1 billion and up to $1 trillion based on the ability of the petitioners to deliver buzz-words in Arabic and kept that up for 4 years, then pulled the plug?