The end of the Cold War and new world disorders
When the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, more or less peaceably, between 1989
and 1991, in a descriptive sense a new world order was born. That order was character-
ized negatively by the absence of a working balance of power. By default, the American
superpower was left in charge of any security problem that it chose to treat as worthy of
its attention.
In 1990, President George Bush Snr spoke briefly, normatively, of a new world order,
but one suspects that there was no deep thought, let alone clear purpose, behind the
elevated language. The world order rhetoric was overtaken immediately by the protracted
crisis triggered by Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait. It is easy to be critical of the statesmen who
have had to make peace out of war. The process has been hugely underexamined by
scholars, in contrast to the attention that has been devoted to the transition from peace
to war. The end of a great war may appear to be one of history’s ‘strategic moments’, a
brief period when bold new approaches to international order should be feasible, but in
practice those moments can have fatally non-permissive contexts.
With respect to the post-war–interwar decade of the 1990s, the Bush administration
(1989–93) faced daunting uncertainties. Had the Soviet Union really collapsed, defin-
itively? What kind of a state would the new Russian Federation prove to be? Germany
was abruptly reunited after forty-five years. Would it be a security problem again? There
were pressures to extend NATO eastwards, despite the promise to the contrary made
by Washington to the Soviet Union. What would, and should, be the roles of NATO in
a Europe bereft of a Soviet threat? Did it have an important job to do in helping to lock
the former Soviet satellites into the practices and values of the Western world? And,
to cite the largest uncertainty of all, what should be the United States’ role in the world?
Suddenly, it was the only superpower, not balanced militarily by a rival or collection
of rivals. But to what ends ought America to lend its strength? What did it truly care
about?
In practice, the answer to the last of these questions was ‘not very much’. The Clinton
administration, like its predecessor, was more than content to leave international ordering
duties to others. In the early 1990s, those others were a newly active UN, one liberated
by the de factodisappearance of the threat of a Soviet veto, and the European Union
(EU). But, as was explained in Chapter 16, neither the UN nor the EU (nor even NATO
minus the United States) proved capable of imposing order, of making peace out of war
in violently troubled places. The Clinton administration meant well. It wanted to advance
the practice of Western-style democracy, to push for freer trade – always provided
politically potent sectors of the US economy (agriculture, for example) would remain
protected – and generally it wished to do good in the world. But the extensive and bloody
disorder of the 1990s lacked a focus, a dominant challenge requiring firm discipline by
the ordering power. Violence had become endemic in much of the former Yugoslavia, in
Russia’s ‘near abroad’ and would-be secessionist regions (such as Chechnya), and above
all in Africa.
A new kind of fanatical, religiously motivated terrorism was recognized, tracked and
occasionally assaulted. But, overall, America did not have a grand strategy for the
prudent orchestration of the instruments of national power. That was hardly surprising,
since it lacked a coherent policy keyed to a sense of duty to maintain international order.
War, peace and international order 273