Stumbling Through the Post-9/11 Era

Reading about Margaret Thatcher conveying security assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev two months before the Berlin Wall fell, I couldn’t help but think that the Cold War, from start to finish, was a mindboggling achievement of Western statesmanship. On the fly and with the survival of humankind hanging in the balance, a generation of political leadership crafted a stable security architecture largely from scratch. Thatcher and George H.W. Bush’s instinctive management of the Soviet Union’s death throes in what Andrew Sullivan calls “brutally realist fashion” was the culmination of that remarkable effort. But it’s important to remember, too, that there were […]