On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
> Name another political leader who's close.
Shane is right about Deng. I think he's far more significant. Another is Eisenhower. Without him, no NATO, no EU. He certainly had as much or more single responsibility for building the cold war structures as Gorbachev had in ending them.
The thing about Gorbachev is that he came at the end of line of reform leaders that the central committee was throwing up. It's very easy to believe that if it wasn't him, it would have been the next or the next, and that the committee had primed themselves to follow him before he led. And insofar as he did lend a personal touch, there's a lot of case to be made that he fucked up his mission badly. It's not accident that he was washed away in history's flood. He helped.
Michael