Thepost–Cold War era is a period of history that follows the end of theCold War, which represents history after thedissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. This period saw many formerSoviet republics becomesovereign states, as well as the introduction ofmarket economies in Eastern Europe. This period also marked the United States becoming the world's solesuperpower.
Relative to the Cold War, the period is characterized by stabilization and disarmament. Both the United States and Russia significantlyreduced their nuclear stockpiles. The formerEastern Bloc became democratic and was integrated into the world economy. In the first two decades of the period,NATO underwent threeenlargements, and Francereintegrated into the NATO command. Russia formed theCollective Security Treaty Organization to replace the dissolvedWarsaw Pact, established astrategic partnership with China and several other countries, and entered theShanghai Cooperation Organisation andBRICS alongside China, which is arising power. Reacting to the rise of China, the United States began a gradual rebalancing of strategic forces to theAsia–Pacific region and out of Europe.
Major crises of the period are generally agreed to have included thewar on terror,war on drugs,Great Recession,COVID-19 pandemic,China–United States trade war,hybrid warfare predominantly using theInternet, and growing concerns surrounding theAI boom,climate change,misinformation,information overload, andwealth inequality. Major conflicts generally associated with the post–Cold War era include theUnited States invasion of Panama,Gulf War,Yugoslav Wars,First andSecond Congo Wars,First andSecond Chechen Wars,September 11 attacks,War in Afghanistan,Iraq War,Arab Spring,Russo-Georgian War,Middle Eastern proxy conflicts, theWar against the Islamic State,Syrian civil war,Russo-Ukrainian War, and theUnited States war on cartels.
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Faced with the threat of growing GermanNazism,Italian fascism,Japanese militarism, and a world war, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union formedan alliance of necessity duringWorld War II.[1] After theAxis powers were defeated, the two most powerful states in the world became theSoviet Union and the United States. Both federations were called the world's superpowers.[1] The underlying geopolitical and ideological differences between the recent allies led to mutual suspicions and shortly afterward, they led to confrontation between the two, known as theCold War, which lasted from about 1947 to 1991. It began with the secondRed Scare and it ended with thefall of the Soviet Union, but some historians date the end of the Cold War to theRevolutions of 1989 or they date it to the signing of the world's first nuclear disarmament treaty, which occurred in 1987.
Ronald Reagan's campaign for the U.S. presidency in 1980 was focused on the rebuilding of the country. Over the next couple of years, the economy was recovering, new foreign policies were implemented, and the market was booming with independence. By contrast, the Soviet Union's economy was declining, its military power was declining, and the Soviet leaders overestimated the amount of influence which they had in the world. The United States' newfound superpower status allowed American authorities to better engage in negotiations with the Soviet, including terms that would favor the U.S.. According toSoviet ChairmanLeonid Brezhnev, reducing the tension between the U.S. and USSR was necessary to focus on fixing economic issues in the USSR. He theorized that rebuilding the USSR would ensure greater economic competition with the U.S..[2]
At the dawn of the post–Cold War era, the Cold War historianJohn Lewis Gaddis wrote that the characteristics of the new era are not yet certain but he was certain that the characteristics of it would be very different from the characteristics of the Cold War era, which meant that a turning point of world-historical significance took place:
The new world of the post–Cold War era is likely to have few, if any, of these [Cold War] characteristics: that is an indication of how much things have already changed since the Cold War ended. We are at one of those rare points of 'punctuation' in history at which old patterns of stability have broken up and new ones have not yet emerged to take their place. Historians will certainly regard the years 1989–1991 as a turning point comparable in importance to the years 1789–1794, or 1917–1918, or 1945–1947; precisely what has 'turned,' however, is much less certain. We know that a series of geopolitical earthquakes have taken place, but it is not yet clear how these upheavals have rearranged the landscape that lies before us.[3]
During the Cold War, much of the policy and the infrastructure of the Western world and theEastern Bloc had revolved around thecapitalist andcommunist ideologies, respectively, and the possibility of anuclear warfare. The end of the Cold War and the fall of theSoviet Union caused profound changes in nearly every society in the world. It enabled renewed attention to be paid to matters that were ignored during the Cold War and has paved the way for greater international cooperation,international organizations,[4] and nationalist movements.[2] The European Union expanded and further integrated, and power shifted from theG7 to the largerG20 economies.
The outcome symbolized a victory of democracy and capitalism which became a manner of collective self-validation for countries hoping to gain international respect. With democracy being seen as an important value, more countries beganadopting that value.[2] Communism ended also inMongolia,Congo,Albania,Yugoslavia,Afghanistan, andAngola. As of 2023, only five countries in the world are still ruled as communist states:China,Cuba,North Korea,Laos, andVietnam.
The United States, having become the only global superpower, used that ideological victory to reinforce its leadership position in the new world order, proclaiming that "the United States and its allies are on the right side of history."[5] This new world order is referred to as "liberal hegemony" in international relations theory. Using thepeace dividend, theUnited States Armed Forces were able to cut much of its expenditure, but the level rose again to comparable heights after theSeptember 11 attacks and the initiation of theWar on Terror in 2001.[6] AccompanyingNATO expansion,Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems were installed in Eastern Europe.[7] However, from a relatively-weakdeveloping country, China appeared as a fledglingemerging superpower that would challenge the U.S. and liberal democracy, creating new potential for worldwide conflict.[7] In response to the rise of China, the U.S. has strategically "rebalanced" to the Asia-Pacific region, but also began to retreat from international commitments in favor of its own interests.[8]
Starting from the 2020s onward, the perceived threat of global terrorism in the post-9/11 era has expanded beyond Middle Eastern jihadist groups, culminating in the United States and Canada designating severaldrug cartels andtransnational criminal organizations as terrorist organizations in the context ofnarcoterrorism and thewar on drugs.[9]
The end of the Cold War also coincided with the end ofapartheid in South Africa. Declining Cold War tensions in the later years of the 1980s meant that the apartheid regime was no longer supported by the West because of itsanticommunism, but it was now condemned with anembargo. In 1990,Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and the regime began steps to end apartheid. This culminated in the first democratic electionsin 1994, which resulted in Mandela being elected asPresident of South Africa.
Socialist and communist parties around the world saw drops in membership after theBerlin Wall fell, and the public felt thatfree-market ideology had won.[10]Libertarian,neoliberal,[11]nationalist[11] andIslamist[11] parties, on the other hand, benefited from the fall of the Soviet Union. Ascapitalism had "won," as people saw it,socialism andcommunism in general declined in popularity.Social democrats in Scandinaviaprivatized many of their institutions in the 1990s, and a political debate on modern economics was reopened.[12]Scandinavian nations are often now seen associal democrat (seeNordic model). It has been posited by some scholars that the end ofcommunism as a global force in the post-Cold War era allowed neoliberal capitalism to become the dominant global system, which has resulted in risingeconomic inequality.[13][14][15][16]
The People's Republic of China, which hadstarted to move towards capitalism in the late 1970s and faced public anger after the1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in Beijing, moved even more quickly towardsfree-market economics in the 1990s, framing thismixed economy as "socialism with Chinese characteristics".McDonald's andPizza Hut both entered the country in the second half of 1990, the first American chains in China (aside fromKentucky Fried Chicken, which had entered in 1987). Stock markets were established inShenzhen and Shanghai in late 1990 as well. Restrictions on car ownership were loosened in the early 1990s and caused the bicycle to decline as a form of transport by 2000. The move to capitalism has increased the economic prosperity of China, but many people still live in poor conditions and work for companies for very low wages and in dangerous and poor conditions.[17]
Many otherThird World countries had seen involvement from the United States and/or theSoviet Union, but solved their political conflicts because of the removal of the ideological interests of those superpowers.[18] As a result of the apparent victory of democracy and capitalism in the Cold War, many more countries adapted these systems, which also allowed them access to the benefits ofglobal trade, as economic power became more prominent than military power in the international arena.[18] However, as the United States maintained global power, its role inmany regime changes during the Cold War went mostly officially unacknowledged, even when some, such asEl Salvador,Argentina andIndonesia, resulted in extensive human rights violations.[19][20][21]
The end of the Cold War allowed many technologies that had been off limits to the public to bedeclassified. The most important of these is the Internet, which was created asARPANET as a system to keep in touch after an impending nuclear war. The last restrictions on commercial enterprise online were lifted in 1995.[22] The commercialization of the Internet and the growth of the mobile phone system increasedglobalization (as well asnationalism andpopulism in reaction).
In the years since then, the Internet's population and usefulness have grown immensely. Only about 20 million people (less than 0.5 percent of the world's population at the time) were online in 1995, mostly in the United States and several other Western countries. By the mid-2010s, more than a third of the world's population was online.[23]
Further research continued into other Cold War technologies with the declassification of the Internet. WhileRonald Reagan'sStrategic Defense Initiative proved untenable in its original form, the system lives on in a redesigned state as theAegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Countermeasures such as BMDS continue to be explored and improved upon post-Cold War, but are often criticized for being unable to effectively stop a full nuclear attack. Despite advances in their efficacy,anti-ballistic missiles are often viewed as an additional piece to modern day diplomacy where concepts such asmutual assured destruction and treaties such as that between Ronald Reagan andMikhail Gorbachev following theirReykjavík Summit.[24]
Alongside continued research defensive countermeasures there has been aproliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Many nations have acquired technology required to producenuclear weapons since the end of theCold War.India tested its first nuclear weapon withOperation Smiling Buddha in 1974. It was followed byPakistan'snuclear program acquiringcentrifuges capable ofenriching uranium in the 80's and in 1998 was able to conduct several underground tests. Today the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China all possess nuclear weapons and have signed theNuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in an attempt to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan, andNorth Korea are also in possession ofnuclear technology but have not signed theNuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[25]
TheCold War brought with it increased research intoradio technology as well as nuclear weapons. The success ofSputnik 1 lead to an increase funding forradio telescopes such asJodrell Bank Observatory for use in tracking Sputnik and possible nuclear launches by theSoviet Union.[26] Jodrell Bank and other observatories like it have since been used to trackspace probes as well as investigatequasars,pulsars, andmeteoroids.Satellites such as theVela that were originally launched to detect nuclear detonation following thePartial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty have been used since then to discover and further investigategamma-ray bursts.[citation needed]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Without the looming threat of a rival superpower, the last thirty years of global neoliberalism have witnessed a rapid shriveling of social programs that protect citizens from cyclical instability and financial crises and reduce the vast inequality of economic outcomes between those at the top and bottom of the income distribution.
The collapse of communism, then, opened the entire world to capitalist penetration, shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.
The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered.