By Patrick J. Buchanan – November 13, 2001

As President Bush hosts President Putin at his Texas ranch, Russia seems but a shadow of what she was only yesterday.

Since the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik, Iceland, Russia has lost a worldwide empire stretching from Cuba to Cam Ranh Bay, including all of Eastern Europe. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine are gone, as are Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, and the five republics of Central Asia. Smaller today than she was 150 years ago, Mother Russia no longer shares a border with Hungary, Rumania, Turkey or Iran. In the 1991 break-up, Moscow lost territory 10 times the size of France.