Fifteen years after the fall
From the "Wolf Blitzer Reports" staff
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It is the enduring symbol of the fall of communism.
On November 9, 1989, jubilant Germans breached the ugly concrete wall that separated East and West Berlin.
Soon the Wall began to disappear piece by piece, visible evidence the Cold War was over.
"When the Berlin Wall collapsed my hope was that we would see the spread of Democracy throughout those countries that had been so oppressed under the boot of tyranny and totalitarianism, and for the most part that hope has been realized," says former Defense Secretary William Cohen.
But the collapse of communism in Europe also had another effect. It produced a power vacuum, upsetting a 44-year balance of power that had kept the world reasonably stable.
"Many of the regimes were propped up either by the U.S. or the U.S.S.R in our competition. When that competition went away, we no longer propped up the regime ... and now they have to have their fight about who is going to rule," says retired USMC Col. Thomas Hammes, a senior military fellow at the National Defense University.
Ethnic conflicts turned into wars.
And while the West was accustomed to dealing with communists, dealing with terrorists was a different matter.
"The problem [with terrorists] is that they don't have a return address. If you know where it came from, they know that they would get nuked in return and that creates a certain deterrence," says Hammes.
The world was a different place before the Berlin Wall came down.
Was it a safer place? Or were we just facing a different kind of danger?
"Any time you have two superpowers operating on almost a hair trigger basis to unleash 20 or 30 thousand nuclear weapons, one can't say that we were safe in any absolute sense," says Cohen.
"There was less violence, less day to day death," says Hammes, "But there's a lot less chance of a really massive kill off now."
