When you were a child, if daddy had allowed you to hit the tree he was felling with your little toy hammer, you might tell yourself that you had a part in the process but that wouldn't make it so. The same holds true with the Vatican's intrusion into world politics, while it's a nuisance and entirely ineffectual, no one wants to be the one to hurt the child's feelings.
It was Gorbachev himself who acknowledged publicly the role of John Paul II in the fall of Communism. "What has happened in Eastern Europe in recent years would not have been possible without the presence of this Pope, without the great role even political that he has played on the world scene" (quoted in La Stampa, March 3, 1992).
That's a very limited viewpoint from which to examine a complex event.
Winning the Cold War was a comprehensive process that included disparate forces ranging from the Pope to Alexandar Solzhenitsyn to the Allied military buildup. We won it for the entire human race and we won because it was liberty of all that we fought for. Force alone could not have defeated the Soviet Union as quickly and with as few casualties in the west as we did without the Pope. Many would say that God was with him, us, and the entire planet.
If you think we will win the war on terrorism with force alone, you'd be sadly mistaken again.