Richard Nixon, the former president who had to leave the White House amid a scandal in 1974, wrote a letter seven pages, dated March 21, 1994, which was addressed to Bill Clinton, at that time the nation’s president.
In this document he gave him some advice on how to manage his relationship with Russia.a country that he envisioned would dissolve its relations with Ukraine.
Recently, the letter was declassified by the Clinton Presidential Library and its content appears to be prescient.
In fact, the text was written a month before Nixon’s death, which occurred in April 1994.
At 81 years old and after returning from a two-week trip to Russia and Ukraine, the former president mentioned that relations between Moscow and kyiv would deteriorate. and in this sense it was projected that someone like Vladimir Putin could assume control of the Kremlin.
According to his vision, democracy under former Russian president Boris Yeltsin was in jeopardy.
“As one of Yeltsin’s earliest supporters in this country and as someone who continues to admire him for his leadership in the past, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that his situation has deteriorated rapidly since the December elections and that the days of his unquestioned leadership in Russia are numbered.
His binges are longer and his periods of depression are more frequent. The most problematic thing is that it can no longer fulfill its commitments to you and other Western leaders in an increasingly anti-American environment in the Duma and in the country, ”he mentions in the letter.
Apart from what later happened to his political career, in 1972, Nixon became the first US president to visit Moscow, where he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which gave it a great reputation globally.
For this reason, he recommended that Clinton develop relationships with potential successors to Yeltsin.
“Bush erred by becoming too attached to Gorbachev because of their close personal relationship. You must avoid making the same mistake in your very good personal relationship with Yeltsin, ”he emphasized.
Interestingly, Nixon’s projection was that deep nationalist sentiment in Russia could produce a “credible candidate for the presidency,” which Five years later, the nationalist regime promoted by Vladimir Putin appeared on the scene.
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Source: La Opinion
