The speech showed that Washington is on a collision course with Moscow as the U.S. rulers extend their reach deeper into the republics that once made up the Soviet Union. These steps pose a challenge to the Kremlin’s influence from Central Asia to the Baltic States.

The governments of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and Georgia participated in the conference. Six of them have become members of NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance, over the last decade. In the past year, Washington has secured agreements from the governments of Bulgaria and Romania to set up U.S. military bases in those countries.

Washington has also taken the lead in pressing the European Union (EU) to accept as members the former Soviet-bloc countries. The governments of four of the countries at the conference—the three Baltic states and Poland—joined the EU in 2004 and those of Romania and Bulgaria are seeking membership.

In his speech in Lithuania, Cheney greeted the “brave leaders of color revolutions”—a reference to the Georgian president who came to power in the 2003 “Rose Revolution” and the Ukrainian president who won an election after the 2005 “Orange Revolution.” Both included mass protests that brought down pro-Moscow regimes, replacing them with ones more closely allied with Washington and its allies in Europe.

Cheney’s speech showed “the cold war has restarted, only now the front line has shifted,” the Moscow business daily Kommersant said, comparing it to one Winston Churchill gave in 1946 warning that an “Iron Curtain” had divided the Soviet bloc from western Europe.

Komsomolskaya Pravda, a pro-Kremlin daily, wrote, “Asia has stayed with Moscow, but former socialist Europe has gone over to the American side.” The paper asked: “What is Russia to do? Evidently it needs to strengthen links with Belarus and central Asia. And get friendly with China, to counterbalance this western might.”

In a televised national address six days after Cheney’s speech, Russian president Vladimir Putin said Moscow needed to “build our home and make it strong and well protected.” In a veiled reference to Washington, Putin said, “We see…what is going on in the world. The wolf knows who to eat, as the saying goes…. And is not about to listen to anyone.”

Putin said it “is too early to speak of an end to the arms race,” pointing out the U.S. defense budget “in absolute figures is almost 25 times bigger than Russia’s.” He said Moscow is producing “the first nuclear submarines to be completed in modern Russia”—that is, since the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s.

Cheney’s next stop after the Vilnius conference was oil-rich Kazakhstan where he reportedly pressed for greater direct U.S. access to the 1.2 million barrels of oil produced each day in the Central Asian republic. “In an echo of the 19th-century ‘Great Game’ involving colonial possessions in Central Asia, the United States is seeking to weaken Russia’s control over oil and natural gas exports by supporting [pipeline] routes that bypass Russia while avoiding Iran,” said an article in the May 6-7 International Herald Tribune.

Cheney’s trip followed a visit to Washington by Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev. Natural gas and oil will start flowing this year from that Central Asian republic through a pipeline across Georgia to Turkey, “marking a major strategic gain for the U.S. in the Caspian energy arena,” said the Financial Times.  
 
 
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