The geopolitical condition of superpower standoff that structured international relations for four decades — and felt, to those inside it, like it would never end
The Cold War was not a war. No American and Soviet soldier ever shot at each other directly. It was a structural condition — a set of arrangements so stable and so total that they felt like the permanent architecture of the world. Then, between 1989 and 1991, the Wall fell, the satellite states broke free, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Forty-four years of seemingly permanent architecture came down in two.