How the Cold War Might End: An Exercise in Faulty Prediction

• Main Author: Gaddis, John Lewis
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 1992
• Subjects: Arctic; Lopez; Mirages
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195052015.003.0008; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/51987092/isbn-9780195052015-book-part-8.pdf

Abstract Most historians, most of the time, wisely avoid making predictions. But in those rare instances when they do succumb to that temptation, they ought to keep track-their colleagues in economics and political science too often do not-of how well those predictions turned out. Certainly anyone who was foolish enough to try to predict how the Cold War might end owes his readers such an accounting. I wrote the following essay in the summer of I987, and it appeared in The Atlantic in November of that year, exactly two years before the Berlin Wall came down.’ I have included it here in its original form, with only slight changes in wording and the addition of a few footnotes. But I have inserted a retrospective critical commentary along the way-a literary post-mortem, if you will-that seeks to explain why this exercise in prediction, like so many similar efforts, turned out to be so wrong. In his splendid book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, Barry Lopez describes the most striking of Arctic mirages the fata morgana, in which sharply delineated mountain ranges appear suddenly from a featureless sea, creating the illusion of land where none exists and tempting unwary explorers to set off in search of constantly receding and, in the end, unattainable objectives. Bleak horizons combined with cold climates, he suggests, can alter consciousness and redirect ambitions in wholly unpredictable ways.