Remembering the Cold War face-off

The last time that a Russian leader faced off with the West — the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — the Cold War made clear the battle lines: it was the Communist USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev versus Free World leader President John Kennedy. Khrushchev had outmaneuvered the president, still smarting from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, at their 1961 Vienna Summit, and constructed the Berlin Wall. However, Kennedy prevailed in forcing the Russians to stand down in Cuba in 1962, and Soviet containment continued to frame American foreign policy.

My father was there

My father, Robert C. Amerson, worked the press tent at the Vienna Summit as a Foreign Service officer with the US Information Agency. My mother, sister, and I saw President Kennedy waving from a balcony at the Summit’s conclusion. Dad was the Embassy’s Press Attaché in Rome during the missile crisis, but it was his experience at the Embassy in Caracas, our first post, during the 1957 Venezuelan revolution that really informed his understanding of the power of democracy, the threat of communism, and the iron fist of dictatorship. His 1995 book, How Democracy Triumphed Over Dictatorship, tells the story. Both of my parents found honor and personal fulfillment their teamed 20-year career in personal diplomacy in Latin America and Europe. You can read Dad’s interview about his foreign service career in the oral history files of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST).

The Cold War faded into history

I’ve recently completed my own book about this life, Embassy Kid: An American Foreign Service Family Memoir (ADST is presenting it for publication this year). Until the events of the past week, it seemed like long-ago history. The end of the Cold War, marked by the 1989 toppling of Berlin Wall, saw the dissolution of the USSR and the emergence of democratic governments in the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine. The Iron Curtain was gone.

Russia’s invasion has solidified the West

However, Russian president Putin carried Mother Russia’s loss of dominion and territory as a personal grievance. His unprovoked military attack on Ukraine this week, which could be just the first salvo in Putin’s goal of rebuilding the former Soviet empire, has garnered the 30-year-old democracy the support of the world — and solidified the partnership between the United States, NATO, and the European Union —  while the aggression of the former KGB agent has condemned and isolated Russia. Even the US Congress rose united in solidarity with Ukraine during President Biden’s State of the Union.

We stand with Ukraine

Strongmen cannot prevail against the winds of democracy. We stand with the brave people of Ukraine, as President Kennedy did with the people of Berlin in 1963, saying ”I am a Berliner.”

We are from Kyiv.