444 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )approval of voluntary limitations of state sovereignty, and enhancement of
the role of nongovernmental groups in world aff airs. Th e Brezhnev Doc-
trine was quietly dropped— to the point that its very existence was oft en
denied. Kovalev’s 1968 Pravda article, it was explained, refl ected only the
personal views of its author and not any policy of the Soviet state.
As interesting as these developments were to international lawyers, po liti-
cal events attracted greater attention from the world at large— culminating
in the end of the Cold War itself in 1989, with the dramatic breaching of the
Berlin Wall and subsequent reunifi cation of Germany. One result of these
changes was to raise the tantalizing possibility of ending the long deadlock
of the UN Security Council, enabling that body to perform its role as a
global watchman against aggression and other threats to the peace. An early
sign that this might be so occurred in 1990– 91, in the wake of the abrupt
takeover of Kuwait by Iraq. A global co ali tion was formed, with UN Secu-
rity Council approval, that forcibly expelled the Iraqi occupying forces from
Kuwait. Th is marked only the second time in the UN’s history (aft er the
Korean War of 1950– 53) in which a UN- supported armed force had been
assembled to repel an aggressor. It looked as if the reign of the rule of law in
international aff airs might be under way at last.
Hope was certainly in the air. President George H. W. Bush of the United
States (a former ambassador to the UN), announced to the American Con-
gress in September 1990, in the midst of the Kuwait crisis, that the world
was now “in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its
found ers.” A New World Order, he proclaimed, was in the making. He
described it as a
world quite diff erent from the one we’ve known. A world where the
rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations
recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world
where the strong respect the rights of the weak.Another sign of the new world was action taken— or at least authorized— by
the UN Security Council in the wake of a military coup d’état in Haiti in
1991, which overthrew an elected civilian government. Such things had
happened on countless occasions since 1945 with no reaction by the UN.
But this occasion was diff erent. Th e Security Council ordered mandatory
economic sanctions against the military regime in 1993. Th e following