The Waning of the Cold War: A Turning Point in Modern History?

Over forty years have passed since the beginnings of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War. By the standards of modern history, that is a fairly long time. We are often told that we live in a time of rapid social change and cautioned against taking for granted the permanence of anything. We are less often warned of the opposite error: a present-mindedness that ignores recurrent patterns of events within the framework of quite durable conditions. Forty years is a sufficiently long time and the world a sufficiently large and varied place for just about every possible hopeful or threatening event short of all-out war or total mutual disarmament to have occurred in the relations betwe...