Later, after he was in Europe actually witnessing the landslide of transformations following the end of the Soviet Union, he began to have a very different take on his new job. “This place is changing,” he told himself then. “It’s getting exciting over here. We’re seeing something entirely significant taking place.”

Before going to EUCOM, Zinni attended the Capstone course for new one-stars at the National Defense University in Washington.

THE COLLPSE of the Soviet Empire came with a whimper. The bangs came later—almost always in unexpected places . . . as unexpected as the actual end of the empire. No one had predicted it. It happened so fast that even the most savvy foreign policy and intelligence professionals failed to get a handle on the specific events, much less to grasp their bigger picture implications. The disintegration started in ’89 when Gorbachev’s perestroika first let the demons out of the bottle. Later, Boris Yeltsin tried to pick up the pieces, but with limited success. What had once been the huge, proud, and powerful USSR had within a year fractured into separate republics, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Baltics, and the Stans.

The Soviet rapid free-fall collapse caused a series of quick reactions from the Western powers. Since the collapse was unforeseen, the reactions were unplanned—and inadequate. It was astonishing that the collapse came as such a surprise . . . or that none of the Western leaders had thought through what to do if containment actually worked and the Soviet Union imploded. “But here we were,” says Tony Zinni, “scrambling to stay ahead of remarkable events that surprised us virtually every day.”

This was not the hoped-for replacement of a worn-out and discredited communist structure with a new, better democratic and free-market one. The fall was far messier than that. True, the old structures had mostly vanished; but their replacements are even now nearly fifteen years later only still emerging. Nobody in or out of the former Soviet Union (FSU) had any idea about what had to be done next. So not very much was done.

When the Soviet Empire slouched off the world’s stage, there was a certain amount of euphoria (many wrongly imagined, for example, that its departure would remove the nuclear threat) and even more relief. “Thank God,” Americans sighed, “the Cold War is over. The Big World will take care of itself. We no longer need the vast, powerful military presence that kept the Evil Empire checked. Peace will bring incredible material dividends. Now we can go about our smaller, private business and get on with our personal lives. Everybody’s going to be secure . . . and happy.”

President Bush announced the emergence of a New World Order . . . without defining it.