Rethinking The Red Menace

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They should worry less about what Gorbachev will do next, or what the tiger he is riding will do to him. Leave that to Gorbachev. He has done fairly well so far. Besides, he has certainly made monkeys out of the experts and prophets.

If Bush can muster "the vision thing," he should apply it to the development of a new internationalism, a new geopolitics that prepares the West, and perhaps the West and East together, to manage the looming problems that will make the chapter now beginning every bit as challenging as the one, mercifully, coming to an end. Whether the new period will be known as the Gorbachev era belongs to that category of unanswerable questions on which it is better not to waste time. But whatever the next stage of history comes to be called, there is no question that Gorbachev has made it possible.