d Europe breathed a sigh of relief. But in the wake of formal reunification, it now appears that the re integration of eastern and western Germans may be much slower and more difficult than it seemed for a time. Elsewhere, the emotion release of freedom has also given way to the grind of economic decline. In Yugoslavia, collapse into ethnic violence seems increasingly probably, and we read in today's headlines names that had been forgotten since World War I: Serbia, Croatia, Boznia Herzegovina.
The darkest blast from the past in 1990 came in the Persian Gulf, where Saddam Hussein asserted the oldest and most primitive of all principles, that of naked force. A world that had just been congratulating itself that it had moved past the age of war awoke to find that a nation, Kuwait, had been simply swollowed up and annexed by a more powerful neighbor. Saddam Hussein, it seemed, was bent on proving that crime could, indeed, pay on the international scale. This writer remembers a friend asking, the day of the invasion, what was likely to be done about it? My answer, at the time: "nothing."
But in fact something was done. Though he had previously diddled and sent mixed signals at best, U.S. President George Bush rallied, swiftly and decisively, responding with both diplomatic moves in the United Nations and a U.S. military deployment. In January, armed with the equivalent of a warrant from the United Nations, he led U.S. forces to war as part of an international coalition. By the end of February, the Iraqis had been routed from Kuwait. It was in that first blush of victory that The Economist's editorial asked the fundamental question: what next?
What was the "new world order" like, and was it any different, really, from the old world of disorder? On one level, the end of the Cold War simply re opened all the older contests and conflicts that had been repressed by the Cold War standoff, or had been subsumed...