US Presidency
1990

The Soviet Union has taken many dramatic and important steps to participate fully in the community of nations. And when the Soviet Union agreed with so many of us here in the United Nations to condemn the aggression of Iraq, there could be no doubt no doubt then that we had, indeed, put four decades of history behind us. We are hopeful that the machinery of the United Nations will no longer be frozen by the divisions that plagued us during the cold war, that at last long last we can build new bridges and tear down old walls, that at long last we will be able to build a new world based on an event for which we have all hoped: an end to the cold war. Two days from now, the world will be watching when the cold war is formally buried in Berlin. And in this time of testing, a fundamental question must be asked, a question not for any one nation but for the United Nations.