By now it is a commonplace that the “Cold War” is over, or at least radically altered. General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently put it bluntly: “We have seen our implacable enemy of 40 years vaporize before our eyes.” The implications of the shattering events in the Soviet Union, however, are regularly misconstrued. The end of the Cold War is neither the great triumph that the Bush administration trumpets (“we have won”) nor the minor event that some on the Left suggest (“the old pattern of intervention will continue unchanged”). It is nevertheless extraordinarily important in three quite specific senses.

First, the collapse of the Soviet-American military stand-off clearly represents a significant, though still limited, coming to terms with the thermonuclear threat. The idea that nuclear weapons are useful (and moral) elements in a nation's international strategy, an idea born at Hiroshima, continues to persist, but there is a reasonable chance—give or take a decade, give or take a major scare—of moving toward a new wisdom that will relegate such weapons to something like the restricted status of poison gas. They exist, but they are less and less likely to be used, less and less “think-able.”

This is not the same, of course, as establishing a “new world order.“ As Paul Kennedy has suggested in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, we may simply see the emergence of a five-way balance-of-power system rotating around the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and what remains of the Soviet Union.