Former Soviet leader: ‘We need to return to the starting line when we began building a new world’

@European Parliament/Pietro Naj-Oleari/flickr/cc)” width=”955″ height=”500″ /> Mikhail Gorbachev at the European Parliament in 2008. (Photo: @European Parliament/Pietro Naj-Oleari/flickr/cc)

by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said the United States is the cause of emerging signs of a new Cold War as a result of the country’s sense of “triumphalism.”

The 83-year-old made the comments Monday in an interview with the Russian state-owned news agency TASS.

“Now the signs of cold war have again emerged,” he said. “Fences are being built around us.”

“I don’t want to praise our government too much,” the UK’s Telegraph quotes Gorbachev as saying in the interview. “It has also made quite a few errors, but today the danger comes from the American position. They are tortured by triumphalism.”

“This whole process may and needs to be stopped. It was stopped in the 1980s. And we opted for deescalation and reunification. Back then it was harsher than today. And now we can also do this,” Gorbachev said.

“We need to return to the starting line when we began building a new world in Europe and everywhere,” he said, referring to his historic 1989 meeting in Malta with President George H. W. Bush.

“There will be people who have the courage to stop this [new Cold War] and start building a new world order that would answer the challenges that the world community is facing,” he said.

Gorbachev’s comments come as the latest ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia appears to have failed. Ongoing violence has killed over 4,000 people since the conflict erupted in April.