ENDINGS 495considered sacred. He signed treaties with the Americans that reduced
its global military power. The communist states of Eastern Europe
were no more. The Warsaw Pact had been broken up and Soviet forces
withdrawn from the region. Moscow no longer subsidized the Afghan
communist government or acted like a first-rank power in Africa or
the Middle East. America had prevailed, the Soviet Union was no
more.
If anyone in the Kremlin or the White House had prophesied this
even a few years earlier, they would have been thought off their heads.
The impossible had turned into the probable and finally into the real.
The world of 1945, held in aspic by the chemistry of struggle between
two superpowers, dissolved before everyone’s eyes. Nobody could be
quite sure what would happen next.