Name : Miftahur Rahmi

NIM : L1A02310066

From the end of the cold war to a new world dis-order?

Introduction

The modern world system is in many ways a by-product of a cold war that took on the appearance of
permanency until it suddenly ended in 1989. But the cold war was itself the outcome of the greatest war
ever known in history the Second World War. Fought on two continents and across three great oceans,
the Second World War led to a major reordering of world politics which left Germany and Japan under
Allied control, most of Europe and Asia in tatters, former colonies in a state of political turmoil, and two
states the US and the USSR in positions of enormous strength. Indeed, as early as 1944, analysts such as
the American writer W. T. R. Fox were beginning to talk of a new world order dominated by something
quite new in international relations superpowers the United States, the USSR, and, in 1944, the British
Empire. With enormous capabilities under their control, a reach that was truly global, and allies who
were entirely dependent on their protection, it was evident that two of these superpowers at least the
United States and the USSR would go on to shape a post-war international system quite different in
structure from what had existed earlier in the twentieth century.

The United States: managing the unipolar ‘moment’

The collapse of Soviet power in Eastern and Central Europe, followed two years later by the end of the
USSR itself, did not just change the way in which millions of people around the world regarded their own
political futures. It also led to profound changes in the structure of the international order. Indeed, with
the passing of the USSR, scholars of International Relations began to talk of a rapid transition from a
world in which there had been two balancing powers a bipolar system to another in which there was no
balance at unipolar system in which the United States would now shape international politics almost
completely. This new global conjuncture raised a series of important questions. One, of course, was how
stable would the new international order be Another was how long could US primacy last And yet a third
was what kind of foreign policy would the United States pursue now that it no longer had a single enemy
to fight in the end, these particular questions were not answered on the pages of foreign policy journals
so much as by the election of President William Bill Jefferson Clinton in 1992. Helped into office by an
electorate that was now more focused on domestic matters rather than international affairs and sensing
that the American people were seeking a new foreign policy approach concentrated mainly on economic
issues, linking prosperity at home with the USs ability to compete abroad. This did not preclude the US
having to address other more traditional threats, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons and
terrorism.
After the USSR: Yeltsin to Putin

Scholars of International Relations have long been deeply interested in the interplay between the great
powers and the reasons why even the most powerful have in the end disappeared from the stage of
history something that happened to the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires after the First World
War, then to the European colonial empires after the Second World War, and finally to the Soviet empire
itself between 1989 and 1991. But history also demonstrates that when empires fall this is not always
followed by stability and prosperity. So it was in the past so it turned out to be following the collapse of
Soviet communism. Many challenges faced the new Russia. First there was the issue of what to do with
the USSR nuclear arsenal, and how to either prevent weapons leaving the former USSR or ensure that
control of them remained in Russian hands. Second, there was an equally serious problem posed by the
break-up of the USSR. Not only did 25 million Russians now find themselves living outside of Russia
proper, but the other nations of the former USSR also had to work out some kind of relationship with a
Russia which found it almost impossible to think of its relationship with such states as Ukraine and
Georgia in anything other than imperial terms. Finally, there was the even more basic problem of making
the transition from a centralized, planned economy, designed to guarantee full employment, to a
competitive market economy where many of the old industries that had been the bedrock of the USSR
including its huge military-industrial complex were evidently no longer fit for purpose. Clearly some very
tough times lay ahead, made tougher still by the extraordinarily painful market reforms that Russia
adopted from 1992 onwards.

Europe: rise and decline?

Though Americans may have claimed that it was the US that won the cold war, it was in fact Europe and
in particular Germany that were the most immediate beneficiaries. First, a continent and a country that
had once been divided were now united. Second, the states of Eastern Europe achieved one of the most
important of international rights the right of self-determination. Finally, the threat of serious war with
potentially devastating consequences for Europe as a whole was eliminated. Naturally, the move from
one order to another did not happen without conflict, as events in former Yugoslavia 19909 revealed
only too tragically. Even so, the new united Europe, with its open borders and democratic institutions,
clearly had much to look forward to. But what kind of Europe would it be Here there was much room for
debate, with some, especially the French, believing that Europe should now develop its own specific
European security arrangements independent of the United States the old Gaullist dream. Others,
meanwhile, believed Europe should remain closely tied to the US a view most forcefully expressed by
both the new elites of Central Europe themselves, not to mention the other, more established members
of the NATO alliance. Europeans could not agree either about what kind of Europe they preferred. There
were those, of course, who sought an ever deeper union that would fulfil their dream of building a
United States of Europe, one that among other things would be able to play a major independent role in
international politics.

A new Asian century?

Perhaps nowhere in the modern world does history, with its memories and myths, exercise a greater
influence than in Asia. First subjected to European power during the nineteenth century, and then to the
even worse depredations of Japan before 1945, it was hardly surprising that Asia became one of the
most unsettled parts of the world after the Second World War. Indeed, while Europe was acquiring some
degree of stability after 1945, Asia experienced at least two devastating wars in Korea and Vietnam,
several revolutionary insurgencies, a genocidal revolution in Cambodia, a short and bloody war between
Vietnam and Cambodia, and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam a year later. If the cold war remained cold
elsewhere, this could hardly be said of Asia before 1989. The contrast between postcolonial Asia and
post Second World War Europe could not have been more pronounced. Indeed, scholars of International
Relations have been much taken with the comparison, pointing out that whereas Western Europe after
1945 managed to form a new liberal security community in which nationalism and ancient hatreds came
to play much less of a role over time, Asia remained a complex tapestry of often warring and suspicious
states, whose hatreds ran deep and where nationalism played a central part in defining identity. Nor did
the end of the cold war lead to the same results in Asia as in Europe. In Europe, 1989 concluded with
free elections, the resolution of territorial issues, a move to the market, the unification of one country,
and the disintegration of another Yugoslavia. In Asia, 1989 concluded with powerful communist parties
remaining in power in at least three countries North Korea, Vietnam, and China, several territorial
disputes remaining unresolved, Korea remaining divided, and memories from the past in particular
Japanese aggression before 1945still souring relations in the region. This is not to say that Asia was not
impacted by the end of the cold war at all clearly it was. However, the consequences were not always
liberal. Indeed, in China they were anything but. Having witnessed what was unfolding in the former
USSR under the reformist leadership of Gorbachev, the Chinese communist leadership decided to do the
opposite, namely abandon political reform and impose even tighter control from the centre.

A new global south

The economic success of Asia poses a much larger question about the fate of the less developed
countries in general during the post-cold war era. These high ideals expressed by new elites, buoyed up
by the enthusiasm of the poor and the dispossessed the wretched of the earth, as Frantz Fanon called
them helped carry the newly independent countries through some very difficult times. Nor did the new
economies prove to be especially productive: on the contrary, the majority turned out to be
extraordinarily inefficient. Finally, with the end of the cold war came the collapse of the idea that some
form of state-led development offered a better way forward than the market. The collapse of the `Third
World` as a political project left behind a complex legacy, from on-going civil wars on some continents
(most notably in sub-Saharan Africa) to the opportunity in others of rejoining the world economic order.

In fact, in many countries the implementation of Western-style structural reform often led to greater
inequality, a decline in public services, and the exponential growth of ever more rampant forms of
corruption as more and more money began to flood into the newly emerging economies. Economic
reform and the rapid reintegration of the `Third World` back into the world economy thus had profound
consequences, both for the countries themselves and for the wider international system. A new world
economic order may have been in the making, but that did not mean that the basic needs of millions of
people were being met. In these less than propitious circumstances, it was hardly surprising that millions
of ordinary people in the South expressed their frustration not by taking up arms (as they might have
done during the cold war), but rather by doing what poor peoples have always done: migrate in
increasingly large numbers.

From 9/11 to Arab Spring

Indeed, the fact that he threatened to use the most modern and dangerous weapons of mass
destruction to achieve his objectives made him a very modern threat, but one that could not be dealt
with by the kind of traditional means developed during the cold war. If this was the beginning of a `new
cold war`, as some argued at the time, then it was one unlikely to be fought using policies and methods
learned between 1947 and 1989.In fact, turning the quite legitimate war of self-defence against the
Taliban in Afghanistan into a war of choice to rid the Middle East of Saddam Hussein in Iraq turned out
to be one of the greatest strategic errors of the age. But even the most trenchant of critics could not
have imagined how disastrous the wider Bush response to the 9/11 attacks would turn out to be, leaving
as it did Iran as the dominant power in the region and jihadi terrorism more entrenched than ever. This
in turn raises an important question: why did the Bush administration decide to go to war to liberate
Iraq?

Whatever the motive including the official Western one of eliminating Saddam’s (non-existent) cache of
weapons of mass destruction the war ultimately failed to achieve its longer-term objective of creating a
stable and functioning democracy in Iraq. Within a few years of the 2003 Iraq invasion, in a region
already burdened by the intractable Arab– Israeli conflict, another unpredicted event in world affairs
took place: the peoples in many Middle Eastern countries began to throw off their autocratic rulers
without much urging from the West. To make matters worse, a new and more deadly form of terrorism
began to make its presence felt in Syria and Iraq in the shape of the so-called Islamic State.

From Obama to trump

If 9/11 marked one turning point in the international relations of the early twenty-first century, then so
too in its own very different way did the election of Barack Obama in 2008.Indeed, when faced with an
economic meltdown that could easily have led to the collapse of the US economy, and possibly a
worldwide depression too, Americans in large majority transferred their support away from one
president George W. Meantime, he hoped (against hope perhaps) that he would be able to shift the
focus of American foreign policy away from the political quicks ands of the Middle East to the
economically enticing and dynamic region of Asia. But perhaps Obama’s main contribution to foreign
policy was less in terms of specific actions taken and more in relation to rethinking the US`s position in
the wider world. Drawing heavily from a series of influential new studies which accepted that the US
was moving into what Fareed Zakaria called a `post-American` world, Obama and his foreign policy team
concluded that if the US wished to retain its leadership in this fast-changing environment it had to
devise more flexible policies.

Other economic actors were moving up, if not to replace the still formidable West (Obama was no
declinist) then at least to play a bigger role in world affairs. If Obama’s approach to world affairs was
balanced and pragmatic, the same could hardly be said of his successor, Donald Trump. Elected on a
platform which attacked globalization as un-American the first US president ever to do so while boasting
that he would `Make America Great Again`, Trump the outsider startled and unsettled the world in ways
that no previous American leader had ever done before (see Case Study 4. Hostile to nearly everything
Obama had done during his two terms, Trump set about attacking what had hitherto been considered
mainstream foreign policy positions.

Trump`s nationalist rhetoric and disregard for more traditional ways of `doing foreign policy` certainly
won him few friends among sections of the liberal establishment at home or democratic friends in
Europe. If that coalition could hold, and Trump could keep the US economy moving forward, then there
was at least a chance that he might get re-elected in 2020, with consequences for the rest of the world
that could prove to be very disturbing indeed.
Conclusion

When the cold war ended and the USSR fell apart in less than three very event-packed years, a good
number of experts genuinely believed that we could now look forward to a peaceful and prosperous
new era. And to add to this mix of problems, it seemed to some as if the West`s moment in the sun was
coming to rapid end with the rise of new powers—China in particular. Yet one should beware of writing
off either the power of the West or that of the United States. Those who now insist with great
confidence that power is shifting somewhere else would be well advised to recall the important `fact`
that the West as a whole still controls a formidable set of economic assets, continues to dominate the
world`s leading institutions, and can lay claim to manifest forms of soft power. When the cold war
ended between 1989 and 1991, many assumed that liberalism had triumphed. As events once again
unfold in unforeseen ways, scholars of world politics—who perhaps thought the world was becoming a
more settled and more tolerant place following the end of the cold war—will once again have to come
to terms with a reality they neither anticipated nor, one suspects, much like either.

My opinion about the author’s writing:

Based on the cited passages, the author's writing demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of
international relations and the post-Cold War era. The author presents a well-researched analysis,
incorporating historical events and scholarly perspectives to support their arguments. One notable
aspect of the author's writing is their ability to provide a balanced perspective. They acknowledge the
initial optimism that followed the end of the Cold War, with many experts believing in a peaceful and
prosperous future. However, the author also highlights the unforeseen challenges and complexities that
emerged in the post-Cold War era, such as the rise of new powers like China and the persistence of
conflicts in Asia.

The author's analysis of key events, such as the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent US response,
demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the complexities and consequences of these events. They
highlight the strategic errors made by the Bush administration in Iraq and the unintended consequences
that followed, such as the strengthening of Iran and the rise of jihadi terrorism. Furthermore, the author
explores the shifting dynamics of American foreign policy, particularly with the election of Barack
Obama and Donald Trump. They discuss Obama's approach to rethinking the US's position in the world
and the need for more flexible policies in a changing global environment. In contrast, they highlight
Trump's nationalist rhetoric and its impact on traditional foreign policy positions.

The author also delves into the impact of the post-Cold War era on Asia and the less developed
countries. They discuss the complex tapestry of states in Asia, where nationalism and unresolved
territorial disputes continue to shape relations. Additionally, they examine the economic success of Asia
and the challenges faced by less developed countries in the post-Cold War era, including the collapse of
state-led development models and the consequences of Western-style structural reforms. Overall, the
author's writing is informative, analytical, and well-supported. They provide a comprehensive analysis of
the post-Cold War era, exploring various events, their implications, and the complexities of international
relations. The author's ability to present a balanced perspective and incorporate scholarly insights
enhances the credibility and depth of their analysis.