Gorbachev blames US imperialism for 'growing global disarray'

MOSCOW -- Former President Mikhail Gorbachev said yesterday that the fall of the Soviet Union, which his policies helped bring about, ushered in an era of US imperialism responsible for many of the world's gravest problems.

Gorbachev is lauded in the West for ushering in democratic reforms but widely despised in Russia for paving the way to the economic free-for-all of the 1990s, which brought fabulous wealth for a well-connected few while plunging much of the country into humiliating poverty.

Although he has since become a supporter of President Vladimir Putin's assertive foreign policy and resistance to American power, his criticism of the United States yesterday was especially harsh.

"The Americans want so much to be the winners. The fact that they are sick with this illness, this winners' complex, is the main reason why everything in the world is so confused and so complicated," he said at a packed news conference.

Instead of ushering in an era of cooperation with the West, the USSR's collapse put the United States into an aggressive, empire-building mood, he said. Ultimately, that has led the United States to commit a string of "major strategic mistakes," he said.

"The idea of a new empire, of sole leadership, was born," Gorbachev said.

"Unilateral actions and wars followed," he added, saying that Washington "ignored the Security Council, international law and the will of their own people."

Gorbachev, 76, shared Putin's opposition to the US war in Iraq.

Russia has fallen out with Washington on a host of other issues, pushing relations to a frosty state that some commentators have likened to the Cold War.

Gorbachev, who won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War, echoed Putin's frequent endorsement of a so-called "multipolar world," without the perceived dominance of the United States.

"No one, no single center, can today command the world. No single group of countries . . . can do it," Gorbachev said. "Under the current US president, I don't think we can fundamentally change the situation as it is developing now. . . . It is dangerous. The world is experiencing a period of growing global disarray."