As Bird and Angel, the CIA, and hardliners in the politburo calculate their options, they all come to the same conclusion. The best thing for each would be to assassinate the Dalai Lama as soon as possible. At this point, the plot has become satisfyingly complicated and appears to have considerable satirical potential. 

Unfortunately, although the author provides hilarious inventions and subplots throughout, he fails to carry through. The politburo's meetings become repetitive and static. The sex scenes are predictable. The Dalai Lama dies in a cancer clinic before anyone has a chance to kill him. Driving home on the weekend to Myndi and her horses, Bird hits a deer. He spends the rest of the novel recovering from his injuries and converting to Buddhism.

Buckley then lets the reasonable, boring people in the White House and the politburo take over. Together, the President's national security adviser and kindly Chinese President Fa outmanoeuvre and stare down the warmongers and nut jobs in their governments. World crisis is averted. 
 
Comfortable endings are fatal to political satire, which requires that things keep spinning out of control. In his acknowledgements, Buckley expresses his admiration for Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick, who together wrote the script for Kubrick's 1964 black comedy masterpiece, Dr Strangelove. It may be that Dr Strangelove could end with nuclear Armageddon because nuclear Armageddon was the great fear of the era. And Angel may be speaking for Buckley the satirist as well as for America's neoconservative military interventionists when she complains, "Winning the Cold War was the worst thing we could have done."