With Brussels under attack by Islamic terrorists, it takes a truly self-regarding president to believe that he, not the Islamic terrorists, was orchestrating a world-historic event. If you missed the news while following the doings of terrorists in Belgium or our presidential wannabees scrambling for votes, you might not have noticed that Barack Obama brought the Cold War to an end, which enabled him to relax from his toils by attending a baseball game in Havana and, later, celebrate by taking a tango-whirl around the floor, performing a series of rather stylish caminadas in the arms of an Argentine bailarina. The death of scores of people, including at least two Americans, has to be weighed against the number who slipped and died in bathtubs last night.

You might have thought that the Cold War ended, or at least the frost began to melt, in 1987. That’s when Margaret Thatcher travelled 1,600 miles to Moscow to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian dissidents, wowed the nation with her television performances, and refused to back down on retaining the nuclear deterrent. And when Ronald Reagan, who a year earlier has held fast on developing an anti-missile system with which the Soviet Union could not afford to cope, and then travelled 4,200 miles to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to demand that Mr. Gorbachev tear down the wall that imprisoned millions of Germans, among them one Angela Merkel. Wrong. It ended, or at least its last remnants did, when Barack Obama travelled fewer than 1,000 miles to Havana, posed in front of a portrait of the murderous Che Guevara, the idol of the left in the President’s university days; laid a wreath at the tomb of poet Jose Martí, famous for his attacks on the American “monster … its excessive worship of wealth … [and its] inequality, injustice and violence…”; promised to consider dictator Raul Castro’s criticisms of America’s education and health care systems; and attended a baseball game alongside a smiling Castro, who had thoughtfully rounded up hundreds of dissidents lest they cast a pall over the President’s visit, and then denied to reporters that any such existed in Cuba’s workers’ paradise. Indeed, he was offended by the question, “It is not correct to ask me about political prisoners,” he told an inquiring reporter.