In my class today, teaching undergraduates who were born around 1988, I wandered off into a description for them of what it was like in 1989 to watch the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire. After the decades of the Cold War, after the a-bomb and h-bomb tests, after the air-raid drills, after McCarthy and the Red Scare, after Hungary in 1956, after Cuba in October1962, after Prague in the summer of 1968, after MAD, after the missile-defense systemafter having lived through all that, and just presuming that the Cold War would go on and on and on, to see the whole thing disappear almost overnight! To see it end, without war, without even much violence! I had tears in my eyes watching the people celebrating in the ancient main square in Prague.

What an extraordinary experience that was! Have we witnessed anything of greater world-historical importance?