The following selection of characters is by its nature arbitrary and hardly definitive, but it is meant to illustrate and illuminate, to suggest further topics for research, and to connect the end of the Cold War both to the present and to the nearly 50-year past. Perhaps the geological metaphor applies here: These individuals are the human faces for moments of punctuated equilibrium in the evolution of international politics, or earthquakes that expose the long-term grinding of geopolitical tectonic palates.
