Post–Cold War era

Short description: Ongoing period of history since 1991

Map showing the change in international borders across Europe and Asia before (top) and after (bottom) the dissolution of the Soviet Union by 1991 and the collapse of communism by 1996.

The post–Cold War era is a period of history that has been ongoing since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which began in 1988 and marked the end of the Cold War by 1991, thereby leaving the United States as the world's sole superpower. At the same time, Europe experienced the collapse of communism and was consequently freed from the "Iron Curtain" between the American-aligned Western Bloc and the Soviet-aligned Eastern Bloc, which gradually embraced market economies. The establishment of the European Union (EU) in 1993 effectively reversed the continent's Cold War divide by absorbing most of Eastern Europe and integrating it with Western Europe over the course of three enlargements.

Relative to the Cold War, the period is characterized by stabilization and disarmament. Both Russia (the Soviet Union's legal successor state) and the United States significantly reduced their nuclear weapons stockpiles, and most Eastern Bloc countries became democratic and were integrated into the global economy. In the first two decades of the post–Cold War era, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) underwent three enlargements and France re-integrated into the NATO command, while Russia founded the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to replace the Warsaw Pact.

More recently, China has become a rising power and has likewise consolidated a greater role on the international stage while building a strategic partnership with Russia, with both countries working in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In response to these developments, the United States has begun a re-balancing of strategic forces out of Europe and into the Asia–Pacific.

Major crises of the period are generally agreed to have included the September 11 attacks and ensuing war on terror, the militarization of the war on drugs, the Great Recession, the China–United States trade war, the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid warfare predominantly using the Internet, and growing concerns surrounding the AI boom, climate change, misinformation, information overload, and wealth inequality. Major conflicts generally associated with the post–Cold War era include the United States invasion of Panama, the Yugoslav Wars, the First and Second Congo Wars, the First and Second Chechen Wars, the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, the Mexican drug war, the Arab Spring, the Russo-Georgian War, the Syrian civil war, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Gaza War and associated Middle Eastern crisis and Red Sea crisis, Operation Southern Spear, the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela, and the 2026 Iran war.

## Contents

* 1 Background
* 2 Subsequent events after the Cold War
* 2.1 United States foreign policy changes
* 2.2 Government, economic, and military institutions
* 2.3 Technology
* 3 See also
* 4 References
* 5 Further reading

## Background

Main article: History:Cold War

Template:History of the Cold WarFaced with the threat of growing German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and a world war, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union formed an alliance of necessity during World War II.[1] After the Axis powers were defeated, the two most powerful states in the world became the Soviet Union and the United States. Both federations were called the world's superpowers.[1] The underlying geopolitical and ideological differences between the recent allies led to mutual suspicions and shortly afterward, they led to confrontation between the two, known as the Cold War, which lasted from about 1947 to 1991. It began with the second Red Scare and it ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, but some historians date the end of the Cold War to the Revolutions of 1989 or they date it to the signing of the world's first nuclear disarmament treaty, which occurred in 1987.

Ronald Reagan's campaign for the U.S. presidency in 1980 was focused on the rebuilding of the country. Over the next couple of years, the economy was recovering, new foreign policies were implemented, and the market was booming with independence. By contrast, the Soviet Union's economy was declining, its military power was declining, and the Soviet leaders overestimated the amount of influence which they had in the world. The United States' newfound superpower status allowed American authorities to better engage in negotiations with the Soviet, including terms that would favor the U.S.. According to Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, reducing the tension between the U.S. and USSR was necessary to focus on fixing economic issues in the USSR. He theorized that rebuilding the USSR would ensure greater economic competition with the U.S..[2]

At the dawn of the post–Cold War era, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the characteristics of the new era are not yet certain but he was certain that the characteristics of it would be very different from the characteristics of the Cold War era, which meant that a turning point of world-historical significance took place:

> The new world of the post–Cold War era is likely to have few, if any, of these [Cold War] characteristics: that is an indication of how much things have already changed since the Cold War ended. We are at one of those rare points of 'punctuation' in history at which old patterns of stability have broken up and new ones have not yet emerged to take their place. Historians will certainly regard the years 1989–1991 as a turning point comparable in importance to the years 1789–1794, or 1917–1918, or 1945–1947; precisely what has 'turned,' however, is much less certain. We know that a series of geopolitical earthquakes have taken place, but it is not yet clear how these upheavals have rearranged the landscape that lies before us.[3]

## Subsequent events after the Cold War

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During the Cold War, much of the policy and the infrastructure of the Western world and the Eastern Bloc had revolved around the capitalist and communist ideologies, respectively, and the possibility of a nuclear warfare. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union caused profound changes in nearly every society in the world. It enabled renewed attention to be paid to matters that were ignored during the Cold War and has paved the way for greater international cooperation, international organizations,[4] and nationalist movements.[2] The European Union expanded and further integrated, and power shifted from the G7 to the larger G20 economies.

The outcome symbolized a victory of democracy and capitalism which became a manner of collective self-validation for countries hoping to gain international respect. With democracy being seen as an important value, more countries began adopting that value.[2] Communism ended also in Mongolia, Congo, Albania, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Angola. As of 2023, only five countries in the world are still ruled as communist states: China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.

### United States foreign policy changes

The United States, having become the only global superpower, used that ideological victory to reinforce its leadership position in the new world order, proclaiming that "the United States and its allies are on the right side of history."[5] This new world order is referred to as "liberal hegemony" in international relations theory. Using the peace dividend, the United States Armed Forces were able to cut much of its expenditure, but the level rose again to comparable heights after the September 11 attacks and the initiation of the war on terror in 2001.[6] Accompanying NATO expansion, Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems were installed in Eastern Europe.[7] However, from a relatively-weak developing country, China appeared as a fledgling emerging superpower that would challenge the U.S. and liberal democracy, creating new potential for worldwide conflict.[7] In response to the rise of China, the U.S. has strategically "rebalanced" to the Asia-Pacific region, but also began to retreat from international commitments in favor of its own interests.[8]

Starting from the 2020s onward, the perceived threat of global terrorism in the post-9/11 era has expanded beyond Middle Eastern jihadist groups, culminating in the United States and Canada designating several drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations as terrorist organizations in the context of narcoterrorism and the war on drugs.[9]

### Government, economic, and military institutions

Nelson Mandela casting his vote in the 1994 South African elections

The end of the Cold War also coincided with the end of apartheid in South Africa. Declining Cold War tensions in the later years of the 1980s meant that the apartheid regime was no longer supported by the West because of its anticommunism, but it was now condemned with an embargo. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and the regime began steps to end apartheid. This culminated in the first democratic elections in 1994, which resulted in Mandela being elected as President of South Africa.

Socialist and communist parties around the world saw drops in membership after the Berlin Wall fell, and the public felt that free-market ideology had won.[10] Libertarian, neoliberal,[11] nationalist[11] and Islamist[11] parties, on the other hand, benefited from the fall of the Soviet Union. As capitalism had "won," as people saw it, socialism and communism in general declined in popularity. Social democrats in Scandinavia privatized many of their institutions in the 1990s, and a political debate on modern economics was reopened.[12] Scandinavian nations are often now seen as social democrat (see Nordic model). It has been posited by some scholars that the end of communism as a global force in the post-Cold War era allowed neoliberal capitalism to become the dominant global system, which has resulted in rising economic inequality.[13][14][15][16]

The People's Republic of China, which had started to move towards capitalism in the late 1970s and faced public anger after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in Beijing, moved even more quickly towards free-market economics in the 1990s, framing this mixed economy as "socialism with Chinese characteristics". McDonald's and Pizza Hut both entered the country in the second half of 1990, the first American chains in China (aside from Kentucky Fried Chicken, which had entered in 1987). Stock markets were established in Shenzhen and Shanghai in late 1990 as well. Restrictions on car ownership were loosened in the early 1990s and caused the bicycle to decline as a form of transport by 2000. The move to capitalism has increased the economic prosperity of China, but many people still live in poor conditions and work for companies for very low wages and in dangerous and poor conditions.[17]

Many other Third World countries had seen involvement from the United States and/or the Soviet Union, but solved their political conflicts because of the removal of the ideological interests of those superpowers.[18] As a result of the apparent victory of democracy and capitalism in the Cold War, many more countries adapted these systems, which also allowed them access to the benefits of global trade, as economic power became more prominent than military power in the international arena.[18] However, as the United States maintained global power, its role in many regime changes during the Cold War went mostly officially unacknowledged, even when some, such as El Salvador, Argentina and Indonesia, resulted in extensive human rights violations.[19][20][21]

### Technology

The end of the Cold War allowed many technologies that had been off limits to the public to be declassified. The most important of these is the Internet, which was created as ARPANET as a system to keep in touch after an impending nuclear war. The last restrictions on commercial enterprise online were lifted in 1995.[22] The commercialization of the Internet and the growth of the mobile phone system increased globalization (as well as nationalism and populism in reaction).

In the years since then, the Internet's population and usefulness have grown immensely. Only about 20 million people (less than 0.5 percent of the world's population at the time) were online in 1995, mostly in the United States and several other Western countries. By the mid-2010s, more than a third of the world's population was online.[23]

Further research continued into other Cold War technologies with the declassification of the Internet. While Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative proved untenable in its original form, the system lives on in a redesigned state as the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Countermeasures such as BMDS continue to be explored and improved upon post-Cold War, but are often criticized for being unable to effectively stop a full nuclear attack. Despite advances in their efficacy, anti-ballistic missiles are often viewed as an additional piece to modern day diplomacy where concepts such as mutual assured destruction and treaties such as that between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev following their Reykjavík Summit.[24]

Alongside continued research defensive countermeasures there has been a proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Many nations have acquired technology required to produce nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. India tested its first nuclear weapon with Operation Smiling Buddha in 1974. It was followed by Pakistan's nuclear program acquiring centrifuges capable of enriching uranium in the 80's and in 1998 was able to conduct several underground tests. Today the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China all possess nuclear weapons and have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty[25] in an attempt to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are also in possession of nuclear technology but have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[citation needed]

The Cold War brought with it increased research into radio technology as well as nuclear weapons. The success of Sputnik 1 lead to an increase funding for radio telescopes such as Jodrell Bank Observatory for use in tracking Sputnik and possible nuclear launches by the Soviet Union.[26] Jodrell Bank and other observatories like it have since been used to track space probes as well as investigate quasars, pulsars, and meteoroids. Satellites such as the Vela that were originally launched to detect nuclear detonation following the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty have been used since then to discover and further investigate gamma-ray bursts.

## See also

* International relations since 1989
* Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict
* Iran–Israel proxy conflict
* Artificial intelligence arms race
* Arms race
* Nuclear arms race
* Digital Revolution
* Postmodernism
* Cold peace
* Interwar period
* Road to Now

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Cold War Revision". Johndclare.net. 21 November 2008. http://www.johndclare.net/cold_war1_redruth.htm.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Goldman, Kjell, Hannerz, Ulf, Westin, Charles (2000). Nationalism and Internationalism in the post–Cold War Era. Psychology Press. ISBN 9780415238908. https://books.google.com/books?id=y0tYwbrj0yEC. Retrieved 2021-03-11.
3. ↑ "The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future," Diplomatic History, 16/2, (1992): p 235.
4. ↑ Mohapatra, J. K., & Panigrahi, P. K. (1998). "The Post–Cold War Period: New Configurations.". India Quarterly 54 (1–2): 129–140. doi:10.1177/097492849805400111.
5. ↑ Condoleezza Rice, "Promoting the National Interest," Foreign Affairs, 79/1, (January/February 2000): p 45.
6. ↑ Shah, Anup (30 June 2013). "World Military Spending — Global Issues". Globalissues.org. http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 GADDIS, JOHN LEWIS (April 1992). "The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future". Diplomatic History 16 (2): 234–246. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1992.tb00499.x. ISSN 0145-2096.
8. ↑ Weisbrode, K. "America's Strategic Surrender," Internationale Politik, Summer 2006.
9. ↑ Rubio, Marco (February 20, 2025). "Terrorist Designations of International Cartels". https://www.state.gov/terrorist-designations-of-international-cartels/.
10. ↑ Archivist (14 January 2013). "Left and radical :: SWP". Socialist Party. http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/keyword/Left_and_radical/SWP/15967/14-01-2013/collapse-of-stalinism-and-the-1990s.
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 "The Lost American – Post–Cold War | FRONTLINE". PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cuny/laptop/coldwar.html.
12. ↑ Francis Sejersted (2011). The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press. p. 356. ISBN 978-0-691-14774-1. https://books.google.com/books?id=P_rlI_S59dMC&pg=PA356.
13. ↑ Ghodsee, Kristen (2018). Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. Vintage Books. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-1568588902. "Without the looming threat of a rival superpower, the last thirty years of global neoliberalism have witnessed a rapid shriveling of social programs that protect citizens from cyclical instability and financial crises and reduce the vast inequality of economic outcomes between those at the top and bottom of the income distribution."
14. ↑ Greene, Julie (April 2020). "Bookends to a Gentler Capitalism: Complicating the Notion of First and Second Gilded Ages". The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press) 19 (2): 197 - 205. doi:10.1017/S1537781419000628.
15. ↑ Bartel, Fritz (2022). The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. pp. 5–6. ISBN 9780674976788. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976788.
16. ↑ Gerstle, Gary (2022). The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 149. ISBN 978-0197519646. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-9780197519646?cc=us&lang=en&. "The collapse of communism, then, opened the entire world to capitalist penetration, shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order."
17. ↑ "Apple's Chinese suppliers still exploiting workers, says report". CBS News. 27 February 2013. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apples-chinese-suppliers-still-exploiting-workers-says-report/.
18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Ruland, Jurgen (22 July 2016). U.S. Foreign Policy Toward the Third World: A Post–Cold War Assessment. doi:10.4324/9781315497495. ISBN 9781315497495.
19. ↑ Bonner, Raymond. "Time for a US Apology to El Salvador | The Nation" (in en-US). The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. https://www.thenation.com/article/time-for-a-us-apology-to-el-salvador/.
20. ↑ Bevins, Vincent (2020). The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. PublicAffairs. p. 157. ISBN 978-1-5417-4240-6. "The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered."
21. ↑ Blakeley, Ruth (2009). State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: The North in the South. Routledge. p. 22, 23, 85-96. ISBN 978-0-415-68617-4. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415462402/.
22. ↑ Cameron Chapman. "The History of the Internet in a Nutshell". Sixrevisions.com. http://sixrevisions.com/resources/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/.
23. ↑ "One third of the world's population is online : 45% of Internet users below the age of 25". Itu.int. http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf.
24. ↑ Pugacewicz, Tomasz (23 June 2021). "Missile Defense Roles in the Post-Cold War U.S. Strategy". Politeja 14 (5 (50)): 263–293. doi:10.12797/politeja.14.2017.50.12. ISSN 2391-6737.
25. ↑ "UNTC". United Nations. https://treaties.un.org/pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=08000002801d56c5.
26. ↑ Spinardi, Graham (August 2006). "Science, Technology, and the Cold War: The Military Uses of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope". Cold War History 6 (3): 279–300. doi:10.1080/14682740600795428. ISSN 1468-2745. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682740600795428.

## Further reading

* Aziz, Nusrate, and M Niaz Asadullah. "Military spending, armed conflict and economic growth in developing countries in the post–Cold War era." Journal of Economic Studies 44.1 (2017): 47–68.
* Bartel, Fritz (2022). The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674976788. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976788.
* Henriksen, Thomas H. Cycles in US Foreign Policy Since the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
* Jones, Bruce D., and Stephen John Stedman. "Civil Wars & the Post–Cold War International Order." Dædalus 146#4 (2017): 33-44.
* Menon, Rajan, and Eugene B. Rumer, eds. Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order (MIT Press, 2015).
* Peterson, James W. Russian-American relations in the post–Cold War world (Oxford UP, 2017).
* Sakwa, Richard. Russia against the Rest: The Post–Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge UP, 2017) 362pp online review
* Wood, Luke B. "The politics of identity and security in post–Cold War Western and Central Europe." European Politics and Society 18.4 (2017): 552–556.

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