By Trip Jennings
The United States has been at war off and on for a quarter century. It feels like forever.
Now we appear on the verge of entering another conflict.
Over the weekend President Trump gave the order for military strikes against Iran in an attempt to hobble the country’s nuclear program, joining Israel in its attempt to neuter a regional adversary and what some consider an “existential threat” to Israel’s very existence.
I’m not going to debate the wisdom of the U.S. military strike against Iran, or speculate on the possible scenarios that could spin off from the action, including a wider regional conflict in one of the more complicated regions on the globe.
No, this is a column about a quainter, more naive time not so long ago: 1989, to be precise.
That was the year the Berlin Wall fell, marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was a bigger-than-life symbol of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union, its archnemesis. Two years after the wall fell the Soviet Union collapsed.
I remember the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall as a joyous, hopeful time. There were cheering crowds in Berlin and stunned press conferences in Washington as our nation’s leaders tried to make sense of it all.
One day, there were two superpowers vying for supremacy around the globe. The next, there was only one. And it was the United States.
I got caught up in the optimistic fervor. As a young reporter at my hometown newspaper I interviewed a German exchange student who was experiencing the fall of the Berlin Wall thousands of miles from home. I profiled a local physician who had returned to his hometown in the former Soviet-occupied East Germany for the first time in decades.
There seemed to be a collective sigh of relief at the end of the Cold War. It was possible to imagine a world free of war after decades of hostilities between two nuclear-armed adversaries.
It is hard to remember how truly scary the Cold War was for many Americans. Two nation-states circling one another warily, threatening a hot war and potential nuclear annihilation that some predicted could end human civilization as we know it should the conflict ever come to pass. It never did.
Instead, the two superpowers fought proxy wars across the globe: in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Africa. And when heads of state didn’t fit their geopolitical interests, they toppled them. (It is worth mentioning this is exactly what the U.S. and Great Britain did in 1953 when the countries’ intelligence agencies helped depose Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and replaced him with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. A quarter century later, the Shah was himself deposed in the 1979 Iranian revolution).
There was nothing quaint about the Cold War. Looking back, however, it is tempting to view a world in which there were two power centers — the U.S. and the Soviet Union — as a less dangerous one than a world with multiple power centers. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle observed more than 2,000 years ago, nature abhors a vacuum. Turns out, it’s true of geopolitics, too.
The era of naivete matured in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. More than a few Americans found themselves under the spell of American exceptionalism, including me, believing the United States had won an existential battle for the ages against the Soviet Union, besting its adversary in a competition of ideas and economic systems .
But reality quickly disabused us of this hubris.
Almost 10 years to the month after the Soviet Union collapsed, the 9/11 terror attacks struck New York City and Washington, D.C., killing thousands.
Less than a month later, the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan and days later came the invasion of the Central Asian country, whose nickname “the graveyard of empires” Afghanistan had earned honestly over two millennia. A year and a half later, the U.S. invaded Iraq. Suddenly, the globe’s sole superpower found itself in a war with two fronts.
Then came the global economic collapse of 2007-08, the rise of China as a successor to the Soviet Union and competitor to the U.S., the COVID pandemic of 2020, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Suddenly, the world seemed like it was cracking apart.
But there was still more horror to digest. The horrific slaughter of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas came in October 2023, shocking much of the world. That was followed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the subsequent slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children. This too shocked much of the world.
In recent days, the news continued to document the carnage, with Israel attacking Iran and the U.S. joining in on the bombing.
As I write this Monday afternoon, the Associated Press is reporting that President Trump has announced that Israel and Iran have agreed to a total ceasefire. It is always difficult to tell what’s real with this administration, and what’s propaganda.
I hope the ceasefire holds if there is one.
The world is on fire. The last thing we need is more gasoline to fuel the flames.
And just think a few decades ago, in a long-ago time that feels like a fairytale in 2025, I was a naive American who watched the Berlin Wall fall and Soviet Union collapse, and believed the world was finally at peace.
What a sucker.
Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.
