An endgame in the Cold War – that is where your secession from the Soviet Empire came into conflict with Mr. Gorbachev´s overall aim – to keep the Soviet Union together at all cost. – It was also in conflict with the realpolitik of Western leaders: to end the Cold War with the USSR; to reach new agreements on disarmament and arms control; to liberate Eastern Europe; to negotiate the peaceful reunification of Germany. And for the US, to secure Soviet complicity towards the 1st U.S. invasion of Irak in January, 1991.
Your secession from the Soviet Union set the precedent for the dissolution of the USSR; it threatened to dethrone Gorbachev and return the hardliners to power in the Kremlin; it could lead to the resumption of the Cold War – with a serious risk of armed conflict in Eastern Europe.
Those were momentous issues of War and Peace; We were at an end of an era.
This is why – instead of welcoming you with open arms – Western leaders put pressure on Lithuania to freeze their declaration of independence; and pressed your leaders to settle for a compromise with your colonial masters.
The gap between the Rhetoric and the Realpolitik – of the principles and the practice – of the leaders of the Western Democracies had become almost unbridgeable.
This is why I felt there was a moral imperative for small nations to act – to fill the vaccum – in the name of solidarity of small nations. And that is what I and my Danish colleague – Uffe Elleman Jensen – tried to be.