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The American goal is to divide the Communist world. As the threat of an atomic exchange was lessened, a sigh of relief was produced by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Europeans had more in common with Americans than they did with other peoples of the world after the end of the Cold War. Europeans were "Americanized" during the Cold War in many ways. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, a new international situation of multiple powers and highly complex economic relationships was emerging, promising to challenge the United States' position as the sole military superpower and as the first industrial power of the world. Europe's future role in this new and volatile configuration remained uncertain because there was no consensus about what "Europe" actually was or should become. Even though it has a larger population than the United States, the European Union is still a minor military power.

Many Europeans didn't like the idea of a united Europe becoming a major military power. It remained doubtful that China, India, Russia, or any number of other rising powers were inspired by the European model in that regard, despite the fact that that non-militarist identity might be held up as one of the more hopeful developments of the early twenty-first century.

By 2012 the European model of "freedom" and its associated parliamentary, liberal democratic institutions did continue to exercise a broad appeal. It is obvious that non-European areas have their own conceptions of what a modernizing freedom should involve, which in many instances involved freeing themselves from European or American domination. What they work out will be different from what Europeans or Americans have done. Depending on the extent to which liberal democracies are seen as successful by the rest of the world and whether any other models achieve greater success. China's economic growth is too recent to serve as a model for the rest of the world. The Arab Spring is filled with problems. Europe and the countries of the world founded by Europeans, if declining relatively, still have quite a head start, and will almost certainly retain prominence among the world's nations long into the twenty-first century.

Europe's Jewish Question was the most complicated of the six questions, its "solution" being the most tragic and the most enduringly uncertain in significance. The initial and most precise form of the question was whether Europe's Jews should be offered civil equality, but by 2012 it was no longer an issue. Most European Jews had modernized to a significant degree, fulfilling a broader agenda of the Jewish Question, although the modernized nature of most European Jews reflected the fact that the least modernized, poorest, and most Orthodox Jews suffered far and away the highest mortality rates from 1939 to 1945.

The Europeans' concern with mastering their past became intertwined with their concern for Israel and its neighbors. The area of the previous Palestinian Mandate was the world's most enduring trouble spot from 1948 to 2012 and experienced wars every decade for the next 50 years. The entire period was characterized by atrocities by both sides. Europeans continued to pay more attention to this tiny area than to other areas larger in area and population, in ways that suggested much about Europeans' evolving identity and the many-sided repercussions of the Holocaust.

The most successful of Europe's nineteenth-century ideologies was antisemitism. The actual goals of antisemites before the Holocaust are difficult to evaluate. Post-Holocaust attitudes to Jews were often impenetrable. "Eliminationist" hatred had been discredited, but it is doubtful that most of the people who were considered antisemites before the Holocaust actually wanted mass murder. The disdain that Jews had faced, in social exclusion or cultural condescension, diminished significantly after 1945, especially in western Europe.