All wars end, and their closing moments are often vivid and memorable. Take, for instance, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865, which brought an end to the U.S. Civil War. Or the armistice that terminated World War I, signed by Germany and the Allies in a train car near Paris in November 1918. Or the end of the Cold War, symbolized by the toppling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and, later, the lowering of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day of 1991. These scenes loom large in the cultural imagination as decisive moments that provided the sense of a definitive ending.
But the spectacle around a war’s end can be misleading. The Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House did not settle political or cultural tensions between the North and South, nor did it resolve the related racial prejudices and political differences, which lingered long after slavery had been abolished. The interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe was suffused with anxieties and tensions that culminated in another great war. The conclusion of World War II marked the dawn of the Cold War. And, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War may not have ended—it may still be ongoing, as the historian Stephen Kotkin recently argued in these pages.
