Bob Kerrey: “I have some good news, and I have some bad news. First the good news: We won. The Cold War, that is. Now the bad news…”

“I have some good news, and I have some bad news. First the good news: We won. The Cold War, that is. Now the bad news: We may find the burden of winning that war as heavy as the burden of fighting it. I say that is the ``bad news,'' Mr. President, because it seems like bad news. But I believe it is both our destiny--a mantle that history has placed on our shoulders whether we like it or not--and an opportunity. The opportunity is this: the furnace in which American values are forged throughout the world is fiery hot, and its door is open. That furnace will not be hot forever, Mr. President. Our triumph in the Cold War dissolved an empire and set free the nations that had been chained up by it. The totalitarian idea was stripped of the thin threads of legitimacy to which its aging adherents continued to cling. The birth of freedom--the opportunity to build new institutions of democracy and world stability--opened. This furnace was hot, and still is, Mr. President, but the opportunity to build from the rubble of a fallen empire also brings turmoil.”