The Return of the Strong: Drift to Global Disorder

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Number of Pages: 361

This text offers a critique of the post-Cold War world, and the action needed to avert disaster. It asserts that the unification of Germany in October 1990 was as historic an occasion as the end of World War II, 45 years earlier. The yoke of oppression had been lifted from Eastern Europe, the Cold War was over, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania were free. Soviet troops marched home, the “peace dividend” was cashed in, two thirds of American forces in Europe decamped across the Atlantic. Democracy even took tentative root in Russia, as its western and southern dependencies secured their nationhood. In 1995, the celebrations seem hollowly premature. A succession of security and humanitarian crises have occurred worldwide, which the international community has proved ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with: Nagorno-Karabakh, Bosnia, Croatia, Central Asia, the Korean nuclear crisis, Algeria, Rwanda, and Chechnya. Incidents involving ethnic nationalism have increased and America is blindly and dangerously disengaging itself from Europe and the world. Germany, Italy and Japan have become more nationalistic and China is rearming. Economically, global capitalism may be at a stage not far different from national capitalism at the end of the 19th century: its authoritarian nature, disregard for national and personal sensitivities, enormous power and incompetence could give rise to a perilous reaction. The parallel is with the complacency of the Edwardian era, which foreshadowed four decades of war, revolution and economic turbulence. Unless action is taken, the same global horrors could reoccur, this time through a nuclear haze.