It should have been a commemoration, but it turned into mutual recrimination. George W. Bush went to Moscow to "celebrate" the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II in Europe. The choice was natural because the Soviet Union had been the US's most powerful ally in that war. But this show of togetherness must have been somebody else's idea. George Bush went along, but he had his own agenda.

Bush has realised that empires cannot be built on military force alone, but need hegemony to endure.

And it had nothing to do with "togetherness".

Bush made his Moscow visit part of a roadshow for his new passion—democracy. First, he sandwiched his visit to Moscow between one to Latvia and another to Georgia. Both were countries "freed" from Soviet occupation, and the latter's president had refused to attend the Moscow "celebration". In Latvia, Bush criticised the agreement reached by Roosevelt and Churchill with Stalin at Yalta towards the end of WW II which handed over the three Baltic states and control of a cordon sanitaire of East European countries to the Soviet Union, and called it a crime. He also blamed the Cold War on the Soviet Union's assault on democracy in the countries "ceded" to it.

In Moscow, Bush criticised Putin yet again for having put democracy in reverse gear. He also virtually announced his intention to "free" Belarus, Russia's closest and last ally, from the yoke of Alexander Lukashenko, whom he called Europe's last dictator. This was, of course, a not-so-subtle reminder that the US had used its influence, swaddled in large sums of money, to oust pro-Moscow regimes and usher "democracy" into Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Had his belligerence been no more than a hangover from the Cold War, we could have put it down to poor taste and moved on. But there was nothing unpremeditated about what Bush said or did. With every word and action, Bush proclaimed that under him America no longer respected national boundaries. Sovereignty and non-interference in other nations' internal affairs were things of the past. Regime change was the order of the day, whether in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus. Only the methods employed would differ.

Even Russia was not exempt. Bush used the occasion to warn Putin that if he did not pull up his socks and become a "good democrat" again, Russia could have a "tulip" or "carnation" revolution (depending upon the season) at its next polls. All that was needed to bring his regime crashing down was a rented mob claiming that the election had been rigged, a complaisant international media that keeps it in tight focus and asks pre-scripted questions, and hordes of desperate pensioners and jobless youth looking for a scapegoat to blame for their sudden impoverishment and loss of security after the demise of socialism.

'Regime change' is in fact the new euphemism for the construction of the US empire. And as Bush said, both at the UN last September and again at his second inauguration, every authoritarian regime is a candidate for regime change. The decision to focus on dictatorships does not reflect a sudden conversion to belief in the virtues of democracy. Bush has belatedly realised, possibly after seeing the global hostility aroused by his invasion of Iraq, that empires cannot be built upon military force alone, but need to establish hegemony to endure. Hegemony in turn requires a legitimising ideology—a goal or belief that everyone can identify with. Bush has found his hegemonic ideology in democracy. It is, therefore, essential to his plans for future world domination that he should trash every accommodation made in the past with a non-democratic power, even if his country had fought a war side by side with it. That is where Yalta and the Baltic states fit in.

Ideology often claims to derive its justification from history but actually murders it to suit its purposes. The Yalta conference accepted Stalin's demand for control over a cordon sanitaire between it and a future resurgent Germany because the Soviet Union had already lost more than 20 million people. Roosevelt and Churchill couldn't refuse him because without Russia they could not have won the war. Western politicians choose not to remember that while the Germans held down the whole of western Europe for five years with only six divisions, Russia chewed up and swallowed 185 German divisions. Had Hitler not attacked Russia, western Europe might still have been part of a greater Third Reich.

Bush's concept of democracy is also one that lifelong democrats, like myself, find hard to recognise. While in university we learned that democracy had to be homegrown to take root. In Europe, it was a product of more than a century of struggle against a combine of monarchy, the church and a militarised aristocracy. That struggle could have ended in defeat had the democrats not been reinforced by the fortuitous rise of a new mercantile capitalist class.

We also learned that the consensus to forego the bullet for the ballot to change governments, which lies at the heart of democracy, only holds so long as social and economic conflict are kept below a threshold level. The former requires a separation of the church from the state, and the latter a strong middle class to act as a buffer between the rich and the poor. None of the countries to which Bush has carried the banner of democracy satisfies either criterion. In Iraq, the overwhelming majority of the dominant Shias want an Islamic republic, whatever that may be. In East Europe, there is not even the beginnings of a middle class. Imposing the template of democracy on such societies is likely to yield freakish results. Imposing it by force at the expense of destroying a pre-existent state can lead to chaos.