Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey

Abstract

T wo decades have passed since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, anyone under thirty has virtually no personal memory of the conflict, and the generation born after the Soviet Union’s collapse is reaching adulthood. In that time talk of the “post-Cold War” has become less common, especially with the onset of the War on Terrorism, but nothing has quite taken its place. One might point to the tendency of recent debate to focus on specific, immediate issues (Iraq, Afghanistan, NATO) rather than more comprehensive approaches to world affairs as an element, but the preceding decade saw a profusion of “big picture” theories. The theories encompassed everything from a Hegelian “end to history” to clashes of civilizations; from a reaffirmation of realpolitik to a new dawn for collective security; from neoliberal globaliza- tion to neo-mercantilist geoeconomics (with American imperium or American decline part of the stakes); from Malthusian catastrophe to postindustrial (or even posthuman) liberation from nature’s constraint. These images inevitably oversimplified the reality they described, and wider discussion tended to sim- plify them further still—but the resulting collection of ideas still has some explanatory power.