But it is impossible to escape the feeling that Western Europeans and the Americans were eager to exchange their strategic Cold War perspective for one focused narrowly on trade and commerce. Those who were ready to consider cooperation with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union in 1990 – the same year that the Charter of Paris aimed to establish a “Europe from Vancouver to Vladivostok” – had by 1992 begun to neglect Russia and the other former Soviet republics, with the exception of the Baltic states.