The war was a defining moment, everyone thought.
What exactly did it define?
-- The end of the old American depression called the Vietnam syndrome -- the compulsive pessimism, the need to look for downsides and dooms?
-- The birth of a new American century -- onset of a unipolar world, with America playing the global cop?
-- Another chapter in an age of astonishments that has brought down the Berlin Wall, ended the cold war and begun preliminary work on the disintegration of the Soviet Union?
-- The first post-nuclear big war, almost as quick and lethal as one with...