The bitter lessons of the Cold War’s end

When the Soviet Union collapsed on Christmas Day, 1991, a wave of euphoria washed over the West. Barely two years had elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and suddenly, the Cold War was over. The decadeslong nuclear stand-off between the superpowers ended, in the immortal words of the poet T.S. Eliot, “not with a bang but a whimper.” Those eventful 24 months upended the Cold War theories concocted by foreign policy experts about the need for détente and permanent “peaceful coexistence” with Russian communism. I was in Moscow...