16 - Requiem for a Cold War

Summary

Throughout the mid-1980s, the Soviet-American rivalry in the Muslim world had remained a “zero-sum game.” Even after Mikhail Gorbachev embraced perestroika and Ronald Reagan toned down his Cold War rhetoric, the two superpowers continued to butt heads. Then between 1988 and 1991, the “end of history” seemed to arrive and George H. W. Bush trumpeted the emergence of a new world order based on cooperation, not confrontation, between capitalist America and communist Russia, even in volatile places like the Persian Gulf. By the early 1990s, however, American and Russian policymakers recognized that the Cold War was more likely to be followed by ethnic and religious conflict than by global peace and prosperity. In late 1991, Gorbachev lost his battle to reform the Soviet Union. Muslims in Chechnya and other non-Russian minorities sought independence. Elsewhere, the multiethnic regime in Yugoslavia disintegrated, with Christian Serbs slaughtering Bosnian Muslims; Islamists won elections in Algeria' and Islamic radicals toppled the pro-Soviet junta in Afghanistan. By January 1993, both Bush and Gorbachev were gone and all the hope for a new world order had been replaced by the fear that the post-Cold War Muslim world was becoming the epicenter of a “clash of civilizations.”