3 - Military Intervention and the Continued Quest for Threat after the Cold War

Summary

In the wake of the Cold War, the formerly Communist countries in East Europe, with Western support and urging, took up capitalism and democracy with considerable alacrity. With the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a quest to identify new threats in the succeeding decade. Most of these, however, were already out there during the Cold War: proliferation, terrorism, drugs, oil dependence, and economic and environment “challenges.” A new opportunity brought forward by the ending of the Cold War was that former enemies could work together to police the world. Disciplined policing forces were effective in pacifying thug-dominated conflicts and in removing thuggish regimes in Panama, Somalia (at least at first), Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. And the Gulf War of 1991 chiefly showed how easy it is to run over an enemy that had little strategy, tactics, defenses, morale, or leadership. However, the deaths of tens of thousands in the war and in its immediate aftermath might have been avoided through negotiation. These ventures were mostly ad hoc, and it is much too grand to consider them to constitute exercises in “liberal hegemony” or a “liberal world order.”