Powell claimed in an article for "The Guardian" on 7 December 1988 that the new Western-friendly foreign policy of Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev heralded "the death and burial of the American empire". Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany had decided to visit Moscow to negotiate German reunification, signalling to Powell that the last gasp of American power in Europe to be replaced by a new balance of power not resting on military force but on the "recognition of the restraints which the ultimate certainty of failure places upon the ambitions of the respective national states".