Mr. Bush, Tear Down This Trade Barrier!

[NATO AIR]

Its absolutely critical that we help Ukraine's fledling democracy by lifting this trade ban..........

http://slate.msn.com/id/2115995/

Mr. Bush, Tear Down This Trade Barrier
How we could really help Ukraine.
By Peter Savodnik
Posted Friday, April 1, 2005, at 4:23 AM PT

A tough row to Yushchenk-hoe

Now that the pyrotechnics of Ukraine's Orange Revolution have burnt out, President Viktor Yushchenko has just over a year to convince his countrymen that the rule of law and free markets are better than dictatorship and poverty. When the Ukrainian visits here next week, President Bush and Congress can help him make that case.

The stakes in this battle over political identity are high: If Yushchenko succeeds, 50 million Ukrainians will take a big step toward reforming the country's economic, legal, and political systems and transcending their Soviet past. If Yushchenko fails, the authoritarian forces arrayed against him—the security services, the old-time nomenklatura, the Kremlin—will dominate in next year's parliamentary elections. Yushchenko's former rival, Viktor Yanukovich, who remains popular in eastern Ukraine, will then become a major force in the parliament, or Rada; the secret police will live on; and the seedy "privatizations" of the 1990s will not be revisited. A new regime, a conglomeration of different-hued holdovers from the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet eras, will return its citizen-subjects to subject-citizens and steer the ship of state back into the Russian "near abroad." America will have truly lost Ukraine.

This, at least, is the fear of many who camped out in Kiev's tent city and flooded the Independence Square in the bitter cold of November and December to demand a new politics.

The leaders of the Yushchenko government are too diplomatic to issue thinly veiled public threats about what will happen if the United States doesn't come to the rescue. But everyone in the White House, Congress, and State Department knows what they want—repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik trade measure, which barred the Soviet Union from gaining Most Favored Nation trade status because of restrictions on Jewish emigration, and which remains in effect for most former Soviet states; market-economy designation care of the U.S. Department of Commerce; and entry into the World Trade Organization. All of the above amount to a single, all-encompassing objective: access to international markets, which translates into more money, jobs, and admission to the much-vaunted "international community." Admission to the international community, to post-Soviets, means never rejoining (or being forced to rejoin) Moscow's sphere of influence.

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