An unlikely series of events in the context of the still-hot cold war conspired against the only real opportunity of reconciliation the two countries have had in 43 years.
It goes back to 1968, when the US was in the midst of the hippie movement and fighting its hottest Cold War battle in Vietnam; when dictatorships ruled most of Latin America, and a recently martyred Che Guevara inspired guerrillas across the continent.
The battle for Abidjan finally appears to be going in favour of Alassane Ouattara, the internationally acknowledged winner of the 2010 election in Ivory Coast, but the bloody manner of his victory will make his inauguration as a northerner in the south even more difficult than ever after almost 10 years of hot and cold war.
The first truly international neighborhood in Mexico City, it was once a landing spot for refugees from all over the world, people fleeing hot wars, cold wars and culture wars.
Americans are rightly proud of thrice helping to rescue Europe from its suicidal follies but, in both hot and cold wars, American governments had to overcome popular reluctance to get involved.This undercurrent is not specifically anti-European, though.
In that respect, new corporatism marks an awkward attempt to reconcile two ideas of "innovation" dating from the postwar years: the industrial kind, flourishing during hot and cold wars, and the iconoclastic kind, rising against the social mainstream.
Western diplomats say the troop mobilizations now are the largest they have seen in more than a decade between the two nuclear adversaries, which have waged hot and cold wars for the last half century.
When the European Union expands eastward this spring, it will end the 65-year divide caused by the 20th century's hot and cold wars and shift the union from a plush club of 15 like-minded nations into a street bazaar of countries differing in wealth, stature and outlook.
Sept. 11, of course, is the dominant reason; it has effectively divided our life into a "before" and an "after," pushing the 20th century with its hot and cold wars, its thickets of nuclear missiles and its arguments into a foggy past.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, is still with us, in all the hot and cold wars that continue along ethnic and political fault lines in the region.
