engdahl is a very good writer with lots of things to present;

The Cold War between the countries of NATO and those allied to the Soviet Union lasted nearly a half century. Finally, exhausted and economically in dire straits, the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, raised a white flag of surrender in November 1989, as Moscow let the Berlin Wall fall. The wall had become the symbol of what Winston Churchill, in his famous 1946 Fulton, Missouri–speech, called the Iron Curtain dividing the West–the “Free World” as Washington propaganda was fond of ever repeating–from the communist world dominated by Moscow.
Outside a small circle of US CIA, State Department, and Pentagon senior officials, together with their allies in select Washington think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute or the New York Council on Foreign Relations, what few realized was that Washington was about to unleash the most concerted effort at regime change across the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and the newly formed Russian Federation itself. The rallying call was the “introduction of US-style democracy, freedom, human rights, a neo-liberal free market.” It was to become a tyranny and in some cases, such as Ukraine, it would be far worse than anything experienced under the Soviet regime.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/manifest-destiny-and-orwells-doublethink-democracy-as-cognitive-dissonance/5648111