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x v Introduction w Ith the end of the cold WaR In 1990, It seemed that a neW era of peace and concord lay ahead. It was a captivating prospect at the close of a century stained by two global conflicts that had left millions dead and by the decades-long Cold War that, on several occasions, had threatened nuclear destruction of the entire world. The Great War of 1914 to 1918 not only killed 10 million people. It also marked an end to classical European civilization and, eventually, to the great empires in Europe and beyond. It was not, however, the war to end all wars. Twenty years later, in 1939, the outbreak of World War II plunged the major powers into violence once again, killing another 60 million people and reducing many of the former great powers to the level of second-tier states. The war also brought to the fore two new superpowers : the Soviet Union and the United States. For more than four decades, these two superpowers glared at each other with suspicion as they conducted a life-and-death struggle for mastery of the world. This cold war—that is, a conflict that featured no catastrophic physical destruction—came to an end in 1990 with the dissipation of hostilities and the collapse a year later of the Soviet Union, which disappeared into the mists of history at the end of 1991. Suddenly, there was just one hyperpower left standing, the United States, and a new era seemed to be at hand. With an end to the U.S.-Soviet struggle, it was difficult to see aggression of a monumental scale, the kind that had triggered two world wars and fueled forty-five years of cold war, x vI INTRodUCTIoN on the horizon. With the possible exception of the Indo-Pakistani conflict , it was the first time in perhaps a thousand years that no major state threatened another major state. Why would the world in fact not be on the cusp of a new era of peace? Why could this not be the so-called end to history, or at least the end of periodic extreme violence on our planet? Two decades later, it is plain that notions about the post–Cold War peace were illusory. The radical change we hoped for was eclipsed by unexpected forces and conflicts and derailed by the mistakes of statesmen. Rather than readmit a prodigal Russia to the ranks of the new powers , a Russia that had emerged from the debacle of the Soviet Union and was prepared to offer concessions to make things right, the West rejected the reformed Russia, which was attempting to be democratic and transition to an open society. And rather than readmit Russia to Europe with open arms, the West, led by the United States, decided to take maximum advantage of Russia’s weakness. This policy was carried out over time by the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the successful Cold War alliance, to include countries on Russia’s borders and by proposals for extending beyond those borders while keeping Russia very much on the outside. The policy of 1945, of reintegrating defeated Germany and Japan, the principal former Axis powers, into the world community and providing substantial economic help, was not followed in the case of Russia. There was no Marshall Plan this time, and, partly as a result of the exclusionary policies of the West, severe economic privation developed in Russia. Established order largely collapsed and was replaced, beginning in 2000, with an increasingly centralized authoritarian state, bringing back some, though certainly not all, of the policies of the Soviet Union. Thus the new Russia is not the economic, political, and military partner for the United States and the West that it might have been. The bipolar world established by the United States and the Soviet Union, while it had as its central organizing principle thermonuclear confrontation and the great dangers that accompanied it, nevertheless imposed a degree of order on the world. The United States controlled its allies and the Soviet Union controlled its allies, and tacitly they tried together to keep the others, the “third world,” more or less in check. But after the Cold War, these restraints were disappearing. Order began declining around the world, and some experts believed that a significant number of states had failed or were failing. Substate actors became more important, exemplified by the rise of international terrorist organizations. Large-scale ter- [3...

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