Post Cold War Alliances As the Cold War ended, a number of expectations

The circumstances of the 1991 Gulf Crisis created a reality which is in sharp contrast with many of these expectations. During the Cold War period, international order was based on the existence of the two primary superpowers. Thus, a bipolar arrangement existed with the United States and its Western allies on one side and the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations on the other side. The primary security concern for the West at that time was the containment of the Soviet Union. In the years following the Second World War, Soviet invasions in Eastern Europe led to a powerful build-up of military strength. The rapid spread of Soviet military influence posed a tangible threat to the democratic values that the Western alliance was seeking to preserve. Thus, the United States undertook the important goal of seeking to prevent the Soviet Union "from achieving total hegemony in Eurasia." In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the decline of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, the strategic goal of containment began to dissolve in importance. Although the Soviet Union's military is still very large and powerful, it is unlikely at this time that the nation will make any serious effort to reassert its dominance in Eastern Europe. This is primarily because such an effort would "greatly tax the Soviet Union's resources" and thereby undermine the recent reform efforts which have taken place in the nation.

At the conclusion of the Cold War, many analysts predicted that th

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the conclusion of the Cold War and the start of the Gulf War. There was little doubt at that time that the bipolar system of superpower confrontation was rapidly coming to an end. However, analysts "assumed not that bipolarity would shrink into unipolarity, but would grow into multipolarity with new centres of power." As noted, a variety of new power centers did indeed develop in the world after the decline of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. However, these international powers each have their own individual specializations which keep them from being the type of uniform force that America represents. The United States, by contrast, contains a consensus of various power bases (military, economic, political) and thus has a special strength which makes it almost unipolar in its unique orientation. As a result, some analysts have claimed that the new world order is both multipolar and unipolar at the same time. Although the Soviet Union has exhibited a decline in power, the United States remains the "superpower" that it was before the end of the Cold War. Thus, according to Samuel P. Huntington, "the emerging world is perhaps best described as a 'uni-multipolar' world." It is generally agreed that this factor has important imp

Category: Government - P