ABSTRACT
The amazing, sudden collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the second half of 1989 caused many in the United States and much of the rest of the world to hail the “end of the cold war.” If the cold war was about the more prosaic issue of maintaining the balance of power, albeit in a very dynamic setting following the collapse of Europe and Japan in 1945, then US interests would be limited to the geopolitical "soft spots" of the balance. If the cold war can be said to have been about something, then it was about the implications, feared and promised, of the political collapse of Europe for both the United States and the Soviet Union. The disintegration of, first, an autonomous European balance of power and, subsequently, German power thrust the United States and Russia into the heart of Europe.
