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political opponents, no fewer than half a million American troops were fighting alongside the North Vietnamese forces. But the Japanese-backed regime was better equipped than had been expected, not least because of the rapid development of Japanese electrical engineering. When Richard Nixon swept to victory in the 1968 election, it was with a mandate to end the war. In a television debate with Nixon before his impeachment, a haggard Kennedy made his bitterness clear. ‘If I had been shot dead back in 1963,’ he exclaimed, ‘I would be a saint today.’ Although, as Diane Kunz argues, Kennedy had a point, his remark was universally derided at the time.
    Looking back on the events of the two decades after Kennedy’s fall from grace, it is tempting to see the subsequent break-up of the Anglo-American Empire as inevitable (there had already been considerable strains over the Vietnam War, which the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson opposed). However, as Mark Almond shows, the Russian economy was far from being in good health itself by the 1980s. Non-conformists had good cause to be critical of the policies of ‘stagnation’ which continued under Tsar Yuri, who succeeded his father Leonid in 1982. On the other hand, the policies of economic and political reform called for by reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev could very well have worsened the economic situation. If Gorbachev had succeeded in increasing the prices which Russia’s satellite states in Europe paid for Russian oil, there could have been serious instability. And, if his arguments for free elections in France, Germany and elsewhere had been accepted, there is no knowing what might have followed. Even without new policies, it was still necessary to send the tanks into Leipzig in 1989, just as had happened in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague and East Paris in 1968.
    What if the Anglo-American states had reacted more firmly to the crushing of the Leipzig rising? If nothing else, they might have dissuaded the Russians from taking further aggressive action elsewhere. But the governments in Britain and America in the 1980s were incapable of such assertiveness. George Bush was a trimmer, compared with his predecessor. More importantly, the Foot government in Britain - elected in 1983 and again in 1987 following the Thatcher administration’s humiliating defeat by Argentina in the Falklands War - was widely accused of being sympathetic to Moscow. When the Sultan of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, staged his long-anticipated attack against the Ottoman province of Kuwait, the West was caught unprepared. Already in the grip of a severe recession, the British and American economies were plunged into an acute and unprecedented slump as oil prices soared.
    Today there are many competing theories designed to explain the ‘collapse of the West’ in 1989-90. Was it the excessive growth of public spending and debt and the monetary laxity of the decades after Vietnam? Or was it the consequence of a fundamentally political division between Britain and the Americas - the legacy, perhaps, of the German occupation of England fifty years before? Yet, as the debates continue, it is easy to forget that, at the time, no one expected anything so dramatic to happen. Most supposed ‘experts’ on the Anglo-American system were simply astonished at the speed with which the transatlantic confederation disintegrated in the 1990s. First, the American states declared their independence from Stuart rule. Then what seemed to be a chain reaction severed the historic links between England, Ireland, Scotland and even Wales.
    Those who had been looking forward to celebrating four centuries of Stuart rule (in 2003) could only reflect bitterly on the unpredictable - even chaotic - quality of great historical events.
    In Moscow, by contrast, the collapse of the West merely seemed to confirm the validity of the deterministic theory of history so dear to Tsar Joseph and his heirs.