Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Cohen

Cohen’s line reads like a restrained indictment, but the restraint is the point: it smuggles a radical claim into the mild cadence of academic prose. By framing Gorbachev’s legacy as “opportunities…for international relations,” he implicitly rejects the triumphalist post-Cold War story in which the Soviet Union simply collapsed and the West naturally inherited the future. “Created” credits Gorbachev with agency and imagination; it suggests that history briefly opened a door not just to peace, but to a restructured security order.

The subtext sharpens in the verbs. “Missed” implies negligence, a failure of attention. “Perhaps even lost” escalates to something closer to sabotage - the sense that what could have been a new equilibrium was allowed to decay into habit, suspicion, and zero-sum thinking. Cohen’s dash does heavy rhetorical lifting: it mimics the moment an educator pauses, then decides to name the culprit. “Here, however, primarily because of the United States” flips the default moral hierarchy. In mainstream American memory, the U.S. is the prudent manager of a dangerous transition; Cohen casts it as the actor that squandered a rare opening.

Context matters: Cohen spent decades arguing that Washington misread Russia’s post-Soviet vulnerability as a permanent condition, treating cooperation as capitulation and expanding its influence without building inclusive institutions that Russia could plausibly join. The intent isn’t to absolve Moscow; it’s to challenge American readers to see how power behaves when it believes history has ended: it stops negotiating and starts consolidating.