Everything was so much tidier before the Berlin Wall came down. There was the small matter of the existential struggle with communism. But after a couple of near-misses, we learned to live with mutually assured destruction. The cold war stand-off was stable and predictable. Security had a single meaning: containing the ambitions of the Soviet Union.
Twenty years beyond the collapse of communism, you catch hints of such nostalgia among policymakers grappling with the complexities of the present. In those days, of course, Saddam Hussein was a bulwark against revolutionary Iran and the jihadis were on our side, pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
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