The World Since the End of the Cold War 1989- 2019

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 is usually considered the event marking the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-Cold War period.

The end of the Soviet Union was not simply the end of the Soviet Union—one of the world’s two superpowers at the time. It also meant the end of the bipolar international system established after World War II, leaving the United States as the sole superpower of the international system and prompting a group of policymakers and scholars alike to trying to (re) define and conceptualize this ‘new world order’— or ‘new world “disorder”’—as others have preferred to name the international system.

While the solutions offered by Gorbachev to the structural problems of the failing Soviet economy were far from a panacea, glasnost would have two
major unintended consequences.

First, it would give the chance to both conservatives and liberals of the Soviet establishment to criticize Gorbachev’s economic reforms. While the conservatives would criticize these as being too much, liberals like Boris Yeltsin, who in the summer of 1990 would be elected as the Chair of Congress of People’s Deputies to lead the Russian Soviet Federative  Socialist Republic, would find them too little. In any case, the row over the content and speed of
the reforms would slowly undermine Gorbachev’s authority, leading to a failed coup attempt against him in August 1991.

Second, Gorbachev’s authority would be further undermined with the flaring of ethnic conflicts in Azerbaijan and Georgia and the secessionist demands of the Baltic Republics. It turned out that the citizens of the Soviet Union, rather than to “voice” their economic woes, preferred to “voice” their historical grievances and grudges against the way the borders of the Soviet Union had been drawn.

Gorbachev’s reforms at the domestic level had also been accompanied by changes in Soviet foreign policy. In November 1985, Gorbachev and his American counterpart Ronald Reagan at the Summit Meeting in Geneva concluded, “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” (Joint Soviet-United States Statement on the Summit Meeting in Geneva, 1985). One of the first outcomes of this change of mentality was to restart the arms reduction and limitation negotiations. The most important of these efforts would be the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in December 1987
and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty I (START I) in July 1991, negotiations for which had begun in 1982. With the INF treaty, the US and USSR would not only eliminate 2962 nuclear missiles by June 1991, but would agree to discard an entire category of nuclear missiles with a range between 500 kilometers to 5500 kilometers and agree on on-site checks for the first time in history (Arms
Control Association, 2019).

The fall of the communist regime in Romania would be the bloodiest of the transitions in Eastern Europe. Romanian leader Nikolai Ceausescu
had ruled the country with an iron fist with his infamous secret service, while Romanians lived in utter deprivation and constant fear of persecution. The harsh suppression of protestors in Timisoara by the Romanian leadership in mid-December 1989 would backfire, leading to protests that spread to the rest of the country. The tide then turned against Ceausescu himself at a rally in Bucharest that had supposedly been organized by his supporters. Protestors, joined by the army, then took over the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, forcing Ceausescu and his wife to flee by helicopter, shortly after which
they were captured. After a brief show trial, the couple fell to a firing squad in late December 1989, ending communist rule in that country

Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The Iraqi government maintained that historically Kuwait had been a part of Iraq and that Iraq was simply correcting an earlier mistake of the imperialist powers. In reality, reasons for the invasion ran deeper. Indebted and war-ravaged as a result of its eight-year long war with Iran, Iraq’s only way out of debt and a path to reconstruction was the revenue it planned to garner by exporting oil. However, with low world oil prices already hurting Baghdad, Iraq claimed that Kuwait was making the
situation worse and disregarding quotas established by OPEC and thus further driving down world oil prices. Second, the Iraqi leadership was not happy that Kuwait refused to forgo Iraq’s debt. Third, Iraq claimed that Kuwait was using slanted drilling techniques in oilfields located near the two countries’ disputed border and thus stealing Iraqi oil. While negotiations were underway in late July 1990 to settle their dispute, Saddam Hussein - Iraq’s president since 1979- simply went ahead and invaded Kuwait.

When the UN’s embargo on Iraqi oil did not persuade Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, US President George Bush announced Operation Desert Shield on August 7, 1990, arguing that the US imported half of the oil it consumed from the region and that the invasion of Kuwait was a “major threat to its economic independence,” (Bush, 1990). Operation Desert Shield, which necessitated a US troop build up in Saudi Arabia and the creation of an international coalition, was the first phase of the war that would eventually drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.

The second phase of the war, Operation Desert Storm, started on January 16, 1991 when US-led international coalition, following a UN resolution, decided to enforce UN sanctions by military force, beginning with airstrikes against Iraq. These were coupled with a ground force in the final phase of operations. By the end of February 1991, not only was Kuwait liberated, but after a humiliating defeat and withdrawal, Iraq agreed to comply with the UN sanctions.

Yugoslavia, established by Josip Broz Tito after World War II, had been able to maintain a semblance of unity among its different republics and ethnicities until the 1990s. This was partially the result of Tito’s popularity as a wartime hero and partially due his defiance of the Soviet Union as a principled communist leader without bowing to Moscow. But more importantly, what kept the country together was easy credit from Western institutions as a result of Tito’s positioning Yugoslavia as a neutral country between East and West.

When Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence in March 1992, a move recognized by the EU, Bosnian Serbs led by Radovan Karadzic and supported by Serbia declared the establishment of the Republika Srpska (“Serb Republic”), which left the Muslim Bosniaks, demographically the majority, with a small piece of territory.

As this was not enough, to enforce the new Serb Republic, Bosnian Serbs besieged several cities, including the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, and tried to expel the Muslim Bosniak population from their recently created state, a move that eventually led to the creation of concentration camps and much worse— the mass ethnic cleansing of the Bosniaks. Nationalism not only tore apart Yugoslavia, but led to the worst ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.

Nationalism not only tore apart Yugoslavia, but led to the worst ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.

UN efforts to mediate the conflict in Bosnia came in two waves. First, in May 1992, the UN imposed economic sanctions on Serbia for supporting the Bosnian Serbs and arms embargo against all of the former republics of Yugoslavia, including Bosnia—a move that placed Bosnian Muslims in a heavily disadvantaged position.

Second, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was sent to Bosnia with the mission of providing a safe passage for humanitarian aid, but not with a clear mandate for intervening in the war.

In April 1993, the UN also declared six safe areas in Bosnia and eployed UNPROFOR to protect these areas.

For Bosnian War, the reluctant American intervention was late for several reasons. First, US leaders were convinced that conflict in Bosnia was the case of an “ancient hatred,”—an ethno-religious rivalry that had been going on for thousands of years, so old that it did not have a clear beginning nor possibly a clear end. Second, a US humanitarian intervention in Somalia had gone horribly awry in 1993, and the Clinton administration was very reluctant to get into another mission, which, they thought, geographically, was the responsibility of European powers, not of the United States.

It was a US brokered peace in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995 that put an end to hostilities in Bosnia with the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton Peace Agreement.

The role of Western powers in the Rwandan Genocide was not only limited to their reluctance to get involved to stop the genocide; additionally, first German, and later Belgian, colonial rule had set the stage for it by favoring the minority Tutsi against the majority Hutu. By the time Rwanda gained independence from Belgium in 1962 as a Hutuled country, the grievance between the Hutus and
Tutsis was already well established. This tension eventually turned into a civil war in 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group led by Tutsi refugees settled in neighboring countries, attacked Rwanda. What triggered the genocide, however, was the downing of the plane that carried the Presidents of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, and Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, both of whom
were ethnic Hutus, in April 1994. 

Intifada is an Arabic term that means “shaking off”. In the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, it refers to two popular uprisings of Palestinians seeking to end Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The First Intifada started in December 1987 and ended in September 1995. The Second Intifada lasted between September 2000 and late 2005.

The Agreement was also seen as a remedy to stimulate the Mexican economy, then in deep recession and heavy debt. Overall, NAFTA turned out to be more of a free-investment agreement than a free-trade one, which resulted in controversial and hard-to-measure outcomes in an increasingly globalizing world. NAFTA definitely increased the volume of trade among members and led to an increase in foreign direct investment into Mexico. But it also led to manufacturing job losses in the US—the exact numbers are disputed—as manufacturing jobs migrated to Mexico, where labor costs and environmental standards were much lower. Though this migration increased the demand for Mexican labor, it did not make a significant improvement in wages or social benefits for Mexican workers.

The Japanese economic boom, or “miracle” of the 1980s, went bust by the 1990s. Extending into the 2000s, Japan saw lower growth and higher unemployment rates. Internationally, however, Japan made substantial changes in its foreign and security policy in the 1990s.

The most important of these was the modification of the Japanese Constitution, which had prevented Japan from sending troops abroad. This came immediately after the First Gulf War when Japan, bound by its World War II constitution, was unable to send troops to help the international coalition against Iraq. Though Japan was not able to participate in the Gulf War, as a result of its constitution, it gave USD13 billion for the war effort. However, when the Kuwaiti government did not recognize the Japanese war contribution, Tokyo had to rethink its security and foreign policy.

This resulted in the adoption of the Act on Cooperation for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations and Other Operations in June 1992, which allowed Japan to contribute to the UN’s election monitoring and peacekeeping operations.

The reactions to the attacks and particularly, the transformation of the US foreign policy in its aftermath, also had a huge impact. The post-9/11 era saw the erosion of democracy, liberal values, and civil liberties across the world and the decline of both multilateral diplomacy and international organizations, as governments vastly increased military spending and surveillance over their own citizens. The September 11th attacks also fueled Islamophobia across western countries, in addition to disturbing the world trade and financial system. 9/11 fundamentally transformed US foreign policy and its relations with the wider world. For one thing, it reinforced the shift from multilateralism to unilateralism in US foreign policy. Indeed, the administration of President George W. Bush, who assumed office in January 2001, had already embarked on a unilateral course in its foreign relations well before 9/11, revealing its refusal to sign or ratify a number of multilateral agreements, including the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The attacks, however, made unilateralism more pronounced in foreign policy. In December 2001, the US announced its intention of withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, for example. It also gave US foreign policy a new focus: the fight against terrorism through the use of military force.

Unlike Bush, Obama’s foreign policy relied on multilateral diplomacy and international cooperation with US allies. Among others, the main aim of his foreign policy was to end the wars and bring US soldiers home. Still, in order to fix the situation, he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan. His greatest achievement in fighting against Al-Qaeda was the killing of its leader, Osama bin Laden, by the US special forces in May 2011. Beginning a slow withdrawal process in 2011, the combat mission of the US and NATO in Afghanistan officially ended in December 2014. Obama had opposed the war in Iraq when he was
a US senator. Therefore, he committed the US to withdrawing from Iraq. In late-2011, US troops completed their withdrawal.

The financial crisis also had far-reaching consequences for world politics. First, it presented a major challenge to the US-led international political and economic order, placing great strain on the basic premises of neoliberal capitalism. Coupled with its foreign policy failures, the financial crisis raised serious doubts about US hegemony and the dominance of the West within the international system. Due to the Eurozone crisis, the future of the European Union also came into question putting the idea of monetary union into a severe test. As the main burden has been shouldered by ordinary people, the financial crisis fueled a great deal of popular resentment against globalization, giving rise to populism, ultranationalism, and xenophobia across western democracies.

In early 2011, a wave of uprisings rocked Arab-speaking countries across the Middle East and North Africa, which quickly became known as the Arab Spring. Rapidly organized on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, anti-government protests eventually brought down a number of dictatorial regimes. Enraged by rising prices, high unemployment, government corruption, and repression and motivated by a desire for political change and more freedom, especially among educated and unemployed urban youth, millions took to the streets in Tunis, Cairo, and other Arab capitals to demand the transformation of their societies.