25 years on: How the fall of the Berlin Wall changed the world

Nobody was allowed to legally accumulate substantial amounts of capital in the Soviet Union, although a handful of bureaucrats and entrepreneurial tough guys managed to grow moderately rich by Soviet standards. The fall of communism was followed by rapid privatization, under U.S. tutelage, of many of the prize assets of one of the world’s largest countries.

A handful of men — most of whom had accumulated wealth and political connections in the Soviet era to take advantage of the bargain-basement sale of the national patrimony — rapidly became billionaires, some of them key political players in the disarray of the Boris Yeltsin years.  Sensing the danger of being stripped of their wealth if they found themselves on the wrong side of the Kremlin, a number of those oligarchs stashed their assets abroad. An estimated $150 billion of Russian capital left the country in the decade that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, draining the Russian economy as it flooded into Western banks and property markets. Forbes’ 2014 list of the world’s richest people includes eight Russians in the top 100. Today more than 35 percent of Russia’s economy is owned by just 110 people.

In the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. found itself engaged in a proxy war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, backing brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Guatemala and serving as the long-standing patron of right-wing dictators across Latin America, many of whom it helped bring to power.

The Monroe Doctrine of the early 19th century defined Latin America as a U.S. sphere of interest in which Washington reserved the right to intervene to prevent any other foreign powers from establishing a foothold. During the Cold War, on the grounds of countering Cuban and Soviet influence, the U.S. intervened early and often to oust governments deemed inimical to U.S. interests — even when those (usually leftist) governments were democratically elected, as in the case of Chile’s President Salvador Allende.

The end of the Cold War changed the geopolitical game on the continent, ending the civil wars that plagued Central America in the 1980s and ushering in a new era of democracy — and foreign policy independence from Washington. Today the majority of countries in Latin America are governed by socialist or social-democratic parties, and China is a bigger trading and investment partner with the continent’s economies than the U.S.

The Cold War's end inaugurated one of the most rapid economic expansions in world history, as the separate Soviet international economic system collapsed and the market-led global economy extended its reach into massive new territories at breakneck speed. The result has been unprecedented growth, with profound consequences for the lives of millions and their communities.

Skyrocketing economic growth over the past 25 years has propelled hundreds of millions of people for the first time into a global middle class, most notably in China and India, the world’s most populous countries.

While the percentage of people among the world’s poorest is lower than at any other point in human history, the entrenchment of the post–Cold War economic order has been accompanied by severe transnational economic shocks — such as the 2008 financial crisis, whose effects were felt continents away from Wall Street; rising global inequality; and looming climate-change peril as the spread of middle class consumption has dramatically expanded the carbon-emitting economy.