There has been abundant scholarly work on the consequences of the
end of the Cold War in the last two decades. It has become widespread in
academic and political circles to take the end of the Cold War as a starting
point and explain all international events taking place right now in the world
with reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States as
the sole superpower. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, the main
discussion centered around how the United States with its uncontested
military and political power would choose to use that power in the system.
Within the academia, Charles Krauthammer made one of the first
statements. In his 1991 article, the Unipolar Moment, Krauthammer argued
that unipolarity, not multipolarity, is replacing the bipolarity. “Our best
hope” he argued ‘is in American strength and will- the strength and will to
lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and
being prepared to enforce them.”1
Around the same time, an article that appeared in New York Times on
8 March 1992 revealed the existence of a forty-six page classified Pentagon
document arguing that “a key US foreign policy goal ought to be ensuring
world continued dominance. The Pentagon draft asserted that America’s
political and military mission after the demise of the Soviet Union should be
preventing the emergence of a rival superpower in Western Europe, Asia, or
the Soviet republics.”2
The document further argued that the US should
achieve this goal by “convincing potential competitors that they need not
aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their
legitimate interests. To this end, the United States must sufficiently account
for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from
challenging (US) leadership or seeking to overturn the established political
and economic order.”3
According to New York Times the document had two
main characteristics: first, its rejection of collective internationalism and,
second, the concept of ‘benevolent domination,’ “according to which world
leadership is perpetuated by constructive behavior as well as military
might.”4
As the time passed, however, the Pentagon retreated from this
position. It soon became clear that the US would ensure multilateralism in
its foreign policy as the first Gulf War and other humanitarian interventions
from the Balkans to Africa demonstrated. The 1990s witnessed an increasing
intervention of the US in world affairs in close cooperation with international
institutions and other states, which brought an old theoretical assertion
back: for the security and the stability of the world, there needed a
superpower-a hegemon.
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