Abstract
We live in interesting times. More commonly-held assumptions about how the world is structured have been shattered by the course of events in these last couple of years than in any year in my lifetime. Take merely some of the most notable changes: Hungary and Poland are no longer one-party states; Lech Walesa is an honored senior statesman in Poland while in East Germany newspapermen complain that no one tells them any more what to write; the liveliest elections of 1989 were perhaps those in the Soviet Union, which the Communist Party lost; Soviet troops have been withdrawn from Afghanistan and Mongolia and Vietnamese troops from Cambodia; the Soviet president is said to be the most popular political leader in Western Europe and very popular in the United States, while far more Americans feel threatened by Japan than by the Soviet Union. The missiles that lined the heartland of Europe are being beaten into plowshares. This set of facts has been the occasion for figures as diverse as Ronald Reagan and George Kennan to proclaim that "The Cold War is over. We won."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
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