"...1989 was less of a watershed year than 1979. The reverberations of the fall of the Berlin Wall turned out to be much smaller than we had expected at the time. In essence, what happened was that we belatedly saw through the gigantic fraud of Soviet superpower. But the real trends of our time—the rise of China, the radicalization of Islam, and the rise and fall of market fundamentalism—had already been launched a decade earlier."

Third, unforeseen operational difficulties led to the loss of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and 18 U.S. military personnel, damaging American credibility in the region. (The number of Somalis killed is not known.)