498 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
strategy for disarmament. Only Kohl with his campaign for German
reunification proved able to canalize the course of events; but even he
needed Bush’s connivance to bring this to fulfilment.
Europe’s political map was redrawn in 1990 as the Cold War was
brought towards closure and the USSR began to fall apart. The mori-
bund ‘world communist movement’ passed into history and
Marxism-Leninism was relegated to dusty library corners. World pol-
itics changed irreversibly. Through the rest of the decade, only one
superpower survived. Russia, the largest of the Soviet Union’s succes-
sor states, cut a weak figure in global diplomacy as its internal
economic and political troubles continued and President Yeltsin had
to play the role of supplicant in talks with the Western powers. Russia’s
stockpile of nuclear weapons, albeit a stockpile that had decreased
through the treaties that Gorbachëv had signed, was the sole reason
why meetings between Russian and American presidents were still
ranked as summits. Washington grew used to lording it over Moscow.
The situation started to change only at the turn of the century, when
there was an abrupt rise in the world market price for oil and gas and
the Kremlin benefited from a steep rise in revenues from Russian
petrochemical exports. President Putin, who was elected in 2000,
became more and more assertive on his country’s behalf in inter-
national politics.
In the last decade of the twentieth century there had been talk in
the West about the End of History. This was based on the idea that
America’s victory in the Cold War would soon lead to the worldwide
introduction of liberal democracy and the market economy. Among
many US commentators a triumphalist mood prevailed. America
had become the single superpower. The crushing superiority of its
weaponry was demonstrated when it led a military intervention in the
former Yugoslavia in the 1990s; and no economy came anywhere near
to American levels of inventiveness as the information technology
revolution proceeded.
It steadily became evident, however, that the Cold War had acted
as a brake on several chronic regional conflicts, and America’s armed
interventions in Afghanistan and the Middle East in the twenty-first
century had untoward consequences that Washington had not antici-
pated. Islamic fundamentalism had harmed the USSR in Afghanistan.
Now it was focused against America and its allies in other Moslem
countries and beyond. International jihadist terrorism spread like a
plague. At the same time, moreover, the US encountered a growing