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Just a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had a warning for a triumphant West. Although “the Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other,” Brzezinski wrote in Foreign Affairs, the decisive outcome did not guarantee a smooth aftermath. Defeat had proved “politically unsettling” in Moscow and turned the wider region into “a geopolitical vacuum.” Securing the peace would, Brzezinski stressed, require “longer-range geopolitical vision” to realize a more ambitious goal: “the emergence of a truly post-imperial Russia that can assume its proper place in the concert of the world’s leading democratic nations.” Whether a better approach to post–Cold War strategy could have achieved such an objective is a question that we continue to debate, even as events this week make clear that the task ahead of the United States and its allies will be just as daunting as the one Brzezinski described in 1992.

— Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Editor

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