The ‘Post Cold War‘ Alway Was A SCAM
I have always been uncomfortable with the designation of the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘Post-Cold War.’ It struck me as a very temporary expression to refer to the current world, since anything that is ‘post’ must necessarily be ‘ante’ something else. History never ends. In a really interesting way, it seems that most intellectuals, politicians, academics etc. who used this term to refer to ‘our time’ implicitly agreed to the sandwiched nature of this period. Something else must be coming which will recast the current ‘post’ period—but what would that be? And in what form will it force us to rethink the ’Post-Cold War’?For a time it seemed that the inflection point—the ‘Post Post-Cold War’—so to speak had come in 2001 with the events of 9/11 and the onset of the so called ‘War on Terror’ that unleashed not only a war on a few middle-eastern crime syndicates, but ultimately ended up laying waste to large parts of West Asia and Northern Africa. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and—of course—the leftovers of Palestine.
However, people continued using the term ‘Post-Cold War”’ to refer also to this period. Looking at it now, it also becomes clear why. We intuitively understood that although the War on Terror was a ‘thing’ in some sense, it was not in another. Although it was an over-arching goal of foreign policy—especially in the West but supported also by Russia and China, as well as in many parts of the Global South– it was not a systemic change. It was an approach at reframing foreign policy priorities, but it did not carry with it a new way of how the globe was organized politically. It wasn’t something that shook the fundamental setup of how things run in world politics the way the great periods of the past did.
My fear over the past ten years was that one day we would be remembering the two or three decades after 1991 as something like the ‘Second Inter-War,’ if, indeed, a Third World War will be what ends the period. Some scholars like Dmitri Trenin argue that we are, in fact, already in this Third World War—albeit this time the warfare being of a different nature than the two preceding moments of global mass-violence. Others have started speaking of a ‘Second Cold War’ to refer to what we are in since the start of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine (the framing of which must be the subject of another essay). The bad news is that both conceptions might still proof themselves to be how we will remember this new period.
Whichever it will be, it seems that slowly a consensus is setting in on what this new period of global confrontation means for the by-gone ‘Post-Cold War’. First, we finally have an endpoint. We can neatly wrap this 30-year period between December 1991 and February 2022. Secondly, over the past years, papers and discussions about the nature of the confrontation are converging around the interpretation that the new global order is one that is best described as ‘multipolar’ (or ‘multi-nodal’, as the eminent US diplomat Chas Freeman argues).
The multipolar interpretation of the new order centers our attention on the good old realist concept of power. We are now living in a world in which several centers of cultural, civilizational, technological and military power have the possibility of not going along with the demands of the previous centers of such power (the Europeans and later the US).
This refocuses our attention to the changes of power configurations over time, especially of the last 80 years. We can understand the world as going through transitions of the number of system-relevant power centers over the live time of currently living generations. From the bipolarity of the cold war to the unipolarity of the Post-Cold War and now the new multipolarity of the current era. Hence, we also have the new name for the last 30 years. The Unipolar Moment.
Realist scholars now have their told-you-so moment as they emphasized for a long time that unipolar systems don’t last, since power accumulation automatically creates counter-balancing forces that will break the monopoly eventually. John J. Mearsheimer being of course the preeminent scholar describing the tragic nature of Great Power politics.
Overall, I think reframing the ‘Post Cold War’ into the ‘Unipolar Moment’ is actually an optimistic take at this period since it leaves open the possibility for the new period not necessarily being one of all-out warfare. Maybe there is something beyond a Third World War or a Second Cold War. With a bit of luck, maybe what we will get is a “New Concert System”—fingers crossed.
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