Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off.
—Bill Clinton
The rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilizations.
—Samuel Huntington
Unlike most prolonged conflicts, the Cold War ended without a formal surrender, treaty, or celebration. Nonetheless, the remarkably peaceful demise of the Soviet Union touched the entire world. Moscow’s former clients such as Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and the Palestinians—already living on reduced subsidies—were set adrift, but the end of the Soviet threat also dealt a blow to right-wing governments in Africa and Latin America that had gained US support based on their anticommunism. In Eastern Europe the former satellite states, no longer in the Soviet shadow, gravitated toward the West; with the discrediting of Marxist ideology, India and other socialist-leaning Third World countries moved toward a market economy; and in the 1990s Vietnam adopted the Chinese model of economic liberalization (combined with the Communist Party’s political control).
Broader developments, originating during the Cold War, also shaped the last decade of the twentieth century. On the one hand, these included the acceleration of technological, economic, and social changes that offered the promise of global cooperation and prosperity (although not without creating new problems); on the other, there was an intensification of radical national and religious movements that frustrated hopes for a more unified and peaceful world.
The technological breakthroughs of the 1990s were built on achievements during the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had invested heavily in developing computers for military purposes. But it was in the West—with its open and decentralized capitalist system—that major advances in information technology had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, first with the introduction of high-speed copiers, fax machines, and cellular phones, but especially with the personal computer and the Internet, which enabled individuals and businesses to overcome barriers of time, distance, and access to information. Similarly, the internationalization of world production and trade began in the West in the 1970s, spurred by the oil crisis and by major technological advances in transportation and communications.
The end of the Cold War underscored the East’s technological backwardness, which Brezhnev and Gorbachev had failed to overcome. The uprisings of 1989, fueled by transistor radios and television as well as by handmade banners and underground samizdat* publications, sprang from populations as fed up with poor service, shoddy goods, and chronic consumer shortages as with official spying and corruption. With the seeming triumph of Western-style capitalism in Europe and throughout the world, borders were opened, markets and currencies were deregulated, and international arrangements were expanded. “Globalization” became the catchword of the post–Cold War decade.
The interconnected world of the 1990s—of swift data transfer and capital movements that facilitated a global supply chain—had its darker side, threatening the livelihood of farmers and industrial workers and making debtor nations vulnerable to the vagaries of international speculators. The swelling migrations of the poor to richer countries—already begun in the 1970s and 1980s—created a backlash that aroused exclusionist sentiments in the receiving countries. Globalization also enabled the spread of diseases, including AIDS, SARS,† and swine flu.
The global environmental movement was born during the Cold War, creating a counternarrative to the Superpowers’ support of unbridled economic development and their competing large-scale, high-tech projects in the Third World. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring (translated into sixteen languages), which detailed the human and environmental dangers of unlimited use of pesticides, had stirred activists to demand stronger regulation of chemicals. Mounting public concern over the release of toxic substances into the ground, air, and water was taken up by the United Nations, which proposed the first Earth Day in 1970 and convened the Stockholm Conference in 1972 to enunciate principles for protecting the global environment. In his influential 1973 book Small Is Beautiful the British economist E. F. Schumacher urged the world’s people to reject the destructive impact of “gigantism.”
Until the 1980s the communist regimes had resisted pressure from the environmentalists. Struggling to raise production figures at all costs, they had created vast areas of environmentally degraded territory and severe health problems even before the Chernobyl disaster. Once the Cold War ended, the United Nations again sought to lead the collective effort to stop or reverse the damage to the world’s fragile ecosystems that now transcended national borders. In 1992 the Rio Conference addressed the problem of global warming—the rise in the world’s temperatures that was the result, many scientists believed, of sharply rising gas emissions from industry, agriculture, and transportation. The ensuing struggle over the 1997 Kyoto Protocol—the first international attempt to reduce greenhouse emissions—pitted the proponents of national sovereignty, economic growth, and human betterment against the protectors of the environment.
On the political side, nationalism, one of the forces that had helped end the Cold War and bring down the Soviet Union, took on a more lethal form in the 1990s. In the former communist world, the Czechs and Slovaks, freed from Moscow’s control, peacefully separated with their “velvet divorce” in 1992. But Yugoslavia, which had been held together for forty years by Tito’s pragmatic Marxism and his bargains among its nations, descended into four wars of succession and the persecution, murder, and displacement of millions of Bosnians, Croats, Kosovars, and Serbs. In the former Soviet Union, the Baltic states took steps to disenfranchise their Russian inhabitants, and the new governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan attempted to purge the religious and national minorities within their borders. Moreover, soon after Germany’s reunification there was an eruption of xenophobic attacks on foreign workers who had been imported by the GDR and also on newly arrived asylum seekers from the Third World.
Assaults on religious minorities and foreigners were not confined to Europe. In Asia, the Middle East, and Africa long-suppressed antagonisms were unleashed against vulnerable populations. In 1991 the attacks by Myanmar’s ruling military junta forced 250,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh. That year Kuwait expelled some 450,000 Palestinian workers in retaliation for the PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s support of Saddam Hussein’s invasion. And in Rwanda in 1994 nearly 1 million Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu majority.
Militant Islamic movements, which had left their mark on the Cold War, posed an even more radical threat in the 1990s. The United States became the target of Al Qaeda (The Base), a fundamentalist Arab group that had joined the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan and afterward announced a global fight against Western dominance of the Muslim world. Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, who settled in Sudan in 1992, directed jihadist operations in the Balkans, Kashmir, and the Philippines and also against US military personnel in Yemen, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia.*
Postcommunist Russia was also engaged in a struggle with Islamists. In 1994 Yeltsin’s government sent forty thousand troops into the largely Muslim province of Chechnya but failed to reestablish control over the breakaway region. In 1999, after Chechen forces had attempted to stir a Muslim rebellion in Dagestan and were accused of organizing terrorist bombings in Moscow, a full-scale Russian invasion followed.
China too faced a militant Islamic opposition in the form of Uighur separatist groups in western Xinjiang province, inspired by the independence of the neighboring Central Asian republics from the USSR. Beijing’s major enemy was the ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement), founded in 1993 and revived in 1997, which the Chinese government accused of some two hundred terror attacks, including arson, bus bombings, and assassinations, resulting in approximately 160 deaths and 440 injuries, as well as of links with Al Qaeda.
Europe, with a population of some thirty-two million Muslims in 1990, also experienced rising Islamic militancy. Among the descendants of the labor migrants from North and Central Africa and the Middle East were those disillusioned by their joblessness and their separation from mainstream society who gravitated toward radical Islamic networks preaching anti-Western and anti-Israel messages and calling for attacks on Jews. France suffered the spillover from Algeria’s civil war when armed Islamists hijacked an Air France plane in 1994, conducted a series of bombings in 1995 and 1996, and declared a jihad on French territory in 1999.
The United Nations, born in World War II and largely ignored during the Cold War, sought to fill the structural and security gap after 1991. Between 1945 and 1991 the UN Security Council’s authority had been largely paralyzed by its permanent members, who applied their veto nearly three hundred times. The Great Powers generally did their own peacekeeping, except when the UN provided a convenient forum for deliberation and decision making, especially over the Middle East. UN forces had performed a series of important tasks in Lebanon, Cyprus, Egypt, and Angola, but one of the United Nations’ major operations—to manage secession and civil war in Congo (1960–1964)—had exacted a heavy political, economic, and human price on the organization and on Africa.
When the Cold War ended, the United Nations’ partisans, hoping for a second chance to fulfill its founders’ aspirations, pointed to the organization’s productive role in ending the Iran-Iraq War, facilitating the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, establishing a coalition government in Cambodia, and ending El Salvador’s civil war. But the failures of UN peacekeeping missions in Rwanda, Angola, Somalia, and Yugoslavia and the continuing tendency of the Great Powers to police their near abroad*—combined with the organization’s financial limitations and its split personality (as both a forum of international diplomacy and one of its actors)—weakened its position as an aspiring global player in the post–Cold War world.
On the other hand, in 1994 the UN General Assembly—faced with the atrocities in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda—boldly revived the principles of the Nuremberg trials and the abortive Cold War attempts to establish a permanent judicial institution to punish violators of international law. After four years of contentious negotiations, 120 UN members signed the Rome Statute in 1998, establishing an International Criminal Court in The Hague to examine war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.† Although the court’s jurisdiction was severely limited,‡ it nonetheless represented a significant development in the post–Cold War world, eventually bringing government and military leaders to trial.
Another promising development, building on the remarkable advances between 1985 and 1991, was in the area of strategic arms control. In 1992 the United States obtained the agreement of the four successor states—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—that housed the former USSR’s nuclear arsenal to adhere to START I and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That year Bush and Russian president Yeltsin also concluded START II, which promised, by 2007, to eliminate heavy intercontinental missiles and multiple-warhead ICBMs and reduce total nuclear warheads. Although START II never came into effect,* it led the way to international efforts in the 1990s to end nuclear testing, strengthen nonproliferation regulations, and abolish the production and sale of chemical weapons under international supervision, which had, however, only limited success. Despite the withdrawal of the massive US and Soviet nuclear arms from Europe, the world of the 1990s was only slightly safer than before.
After Cambodia’s civil war ended in 1991, Asia was at peace for the first time in over six decades, but the end of the US-Soviet rivalry raised the issue of regional order and security, in which China’s role had become paramount.†
The PRC’s extraordinary economic development—its impressive growth rate and burgeoning trade figures—was matched in the 1990s by its increasingly assertive foreign policy. Responding to the perceived threat of US hegemony, Beijing’s leadership reached out to its noncommunist Asian neighbors Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, and even India, and participated in regional forums such as APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) and ASEAN. Moreover, China reestablished ties with Vietnam in 1991 and in 1992 forged a “strategic partnership” with Yeltsin’s Russia. But by contesting possession of several islands in the South China Sea (reportedly having major gas and oil reserves) with its neighbors, exerting military pressure on Taiwan in 1995, and removing the British from Hong Kong in 1997, China also kept the region off balance, combining restraint and conciliation with a willingness to defend its interests forcefully.
At the same time, China sought to repair its ties with the United States, and under the administration of President Bill Clinton Sino-US relations measurably improved. The PRC pledged to adhere to international conventions on nonproliferation and nuclear testing as well as on environmental protection and human rights, and it negotiated new economic arrangements with Washington in order to facilitate its entry into the World Trade Organization. But sources of tension had not disappeared, particularly over America’s lingering Cold War strategy of nuclear deterrence, alliance formation, and the use of military force to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign governments.* Nonetheless, Beijing, chastened by the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis and faced with growing unrest at home, chose domestic economic development over a direct challenge to US power.
In northeast Asia the Cold War still remained vivid, because of the partition of Korea. In the 1980s the economic gap between North and South Korea had drastically widened, and in the early 1990s Russia and China abruptly terminated their subsidies to Pyongyang and avidly courted Seoul, whereupon a desperate North Korea played the nuclear card. A reluctant signatory of the nonproliferation treaty, the dictator Kim Il Sung sought to save his regime from collapse and absorption by building nuclear weapons and a missile program that would threaten South Korea (and possibly Japan), destabilize the region, and force the United States into negotiations.† But when North Korea refused to permit UN inspections of its nuclear waste sites, the Clinton administration reacted strongly, condemning Pyongyang and engineering tough UN sanctions that drove it to the conference table.
Clinton also defused the crisis. Ending more than four decades of ostracism of North Korea and defying congressional opposition to appeasing a rogue regime, he sent former President Carter to Pyongyang on a mediating mission and in October 1994 concluded an agreement (the Agreed Framework) with Kim Il Sung’s successor, Kim Jong Il. In return for Pyongyang’s closure of its nuclear facilities and allowing international inspections, the United States would provide assistance in building light-water reactors (not capable of plutonium production) and supplying heavy oil for heating and electricity until the new plants were built. After floods devastated North Korea’s farmland in 1996 and 1997, the United States also provided food, medicine, and other forms of humanitarian aid at a total of more than $61 million.
However, the bribe did not work. Not only did North Korea continue to obstruct UN inspections and develop its nuclear capacity, but in 1998 it fired a ballistic missile over Japanese territory. In 2002 North Korea repudiated the framework and evicted the inspectors, and the next year it seceded from the NPT, precipitating a second international crisis. This time, however, the United States did not act alone. Beijing (which in 1994 had only quietly backed Washington out of fear of destabilizing its longtime ally and precipitating its demise) now called for multilateral negotiations, which included the two Koreas, China, Russia, and the United States. But North Korea was not to be halted. In 2006 it exploded its first nuclear weapon, and the unsolved Korean question lingered over Asia.
Africa fared badly during the last two decades of the Cold War when the Superpowers intervened with arms and military advisers to promote their respective interests, but the end of the US-Soviet rivalry was also ruinous for many parts of the continent, which were largely removed from the world’s attention. The collapse of the Washington- and Moscow-backed dictatorships in Somalia and Ethiopia in 1991 led to the disintegration of both countries, and the civil wars in Sudan and Angola and the genocide against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda underscored the absence of solid regional or international arrangements.
Two new players moved into the breach. The United Nations provided humanitarian aid to war-ravaged populations, brokered a temporary power-sharing arrangement in Angola in 1994, and ministered to refugees from Rwanda and Somalia. By the 1990s, China was also playing a significant role in Africa, purchasing its raw materials and energy resources and providing investment funds for infrastructure politics, but also maintaining a strict policy of noninterference in local politics.
The most striking result of the end of the Cold War occurred in South Africa. Five months after assuming the presidency in September 1989, the Nationalist leader F. W. de Klerk startled the world by announcing the end of Apartheid, the legalization of the African National Congress, and the release of political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela after his twenty-seven-year incarceration. Subsequently, the Pretoria government quietly destroyed South Africa’s entire secret nuclear arsenal and launched political negotiations between black and white leaders. South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy in 1989 had many causes, among them the spirit of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, which was not quenched by government repression, and the international boycott movement of the 1980s, which sought to change Pretoria’s racist policies. Moreover, the collapse of European communism in 1989 and Gorbachev’s decision to cease funding resistance movements in Africa greatly diminished the influence and resources of local Marxists and of the militant left-wing elements of the African National Congress over the border in Angola. The government of South Africa could no longer claim it was a Cold War battlefield.
De Klerk’s initiative was also related to the settlement over Namibia, which his country had long obstructed in the United Nations. The mounting costs of holding onto its truculent colony had convinced Pretoria it was time to leave. It was also time to end South Africa’s covert intervention in Angola, where casualties were mounting. Under patient and persistent US mediation, a grand bargain was struck whereby the Cuban troops were removed from Angola in return for South Africa’s withdrawal and for the termination of its occupation of Namibia.
The Angola/Namibia Accords, signed in New York on December 22, 1998 (two weeks after Gorbachev’s UN speech), marked a decisive moment in Cold War history. They not only ended more than two decades of Superpower-fueled fighting and a communist withdrawal* but also marked the end of colonialism in Africa with the surrender of a territory seized during World War I. In November 1989 Namibia held its first free elections and gained its independence in March 1990. Under South Africa’s close scrutiny, Namibia established a multiparty democracy and free-market economy. In the meantime de Klerk was managing the changeover from white-minority rule to a democratic South Africa. In May 1994, one month after the country’s first multiracial elections, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s president.†
Like the USSR’s, South Africa’s transition to democracy arose from popular protests and top-down decisions, an outstanding leader and a favorable international climate. However, its first post-Apartheid decade was marred by high rates of capital flight and emigration, unemployment and violent crime,* along with the scourge of the AIDS epidemic. Still Africa’s richest and most powerful state, South Africa after 1994 was no longer an anticommunist bastion and a regional and global pariah. It had become a middle-sized power that wavered between supporting liberal principles and endorsing a radical democratic foreign policy, more inclined to play the role of a good international citizen, projecting its influence through multinational institutions, than to act alone.
Throughout the Cold War the Superpowers had fluctuated between confrontation and cooperation in the Middle East leaving one of its core problems—Israel and the Palestinians—unresolved. The outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 1987 had focused the world’s attention on Israel’s two-decade-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the unresolved problem of self-determination for the Palestinian people. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and the victory of the US-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War had not only widened the rifts in the Arab world† but also tipped the balance of power in the Middle East.
The Bush administration, seizing this extraordinary moment, convened a peace conference in Madrid in October 1991. Although technically cosponsored by the fading Gorbachev, Washington’s intention was to complete the unfinished work of Carter’s Camp David agreement by producing a comprehensive Middle East settlement. Yet despite Secretary of State James Baker’s best efforts, the participants brought little enthusiasm to the negotiations. The follow-up talks in Washington were fruitless, and with Bush’s electoral defeat in November 1992 the American initiative expired the following June.
Once more in the Middle East, a breakthrough came from an unexpected source. From his Tunisian exile, the PLO leader Yasser Arafat had fretted over his new rival Hamas,* which had sparked the Intifada and was gaining influence in the West Bank and Gaza. Isolated internationally, the PLO was also strapped financially by the termination of Moscow’s subsidies and the withdrawal of Saudi and Gulf State funding in retaliation for Arafat’s support of Saddam Hussein. Excluded from the Madrid talks, Arafat feared a US-brokered Syrian-Israeli agreement, which would further weaken the Palestinian cause.
In June 1992 Arafat found a partner when the legendary military chief and Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin became Israel’s prime minister on a platform of trading land for peace with Israel’s neighbors, including the Palestinians. The Israeli public—stung by international criticism of its government’s forceful repression of the Intifada and stunned by the attacks of the Iraqi Scud missiles on Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War—had become open to an accommodation with the Palestinians. The once-reviled and now-weakened Arafat represented a far more acceptable negotiating partner than Hamas and the even more radical Islamic jihad.
In a bold move that sidestepped the faltering Washington negotiations, Israeli and PLO negotiators began secret talks in Oslo, guided by tough but patient Norwegian mediators, and by late summer 1993 produced a breakthrough agreement. The new Clinton administration, which had been apprised of the negotiations but not the details, hosted a gala signing ceremony on the south lawn of the White House on September 13, 1993. The historic Oslo Accords, which brought its authors† the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, consisted of two parts: a mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, and a Declaration of Principles (DOP) setting forth a five-year agenda for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza under the auspices of a newly created Palestinian Authority.
Israel reaped considerable benefit from the Oslo Accords, gaining praise and increased contacts with the world community. Recognition by the Palestinians ended five and a half decades of collective Arab opposition to its existence. A peace treaty with Jordan was signed in October 1994, followed by the establishment of consular relations with four other Arab states and expanded economic relations with others. But Syria, which Arafat had not consulted, refused to deal with Israel.
Moreover, the Oslo Accords, which had been concluded between two highly unequal parties—a sovereign state and an occupied people—left serious elements unsolved, above all the shape of a permanent settlement and of a future Palestinian entity. Moreover, the DOP was silent over such crucial issues as the future of Jerusalem (which both Israelis and Palestinians claimed as their capital), the right of return of the Palestinians refugees who had left Israel in 1948–1949, and the future of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
Not surprisingly, the accords raised vociferous opposition on both sides. The Israeli Right (still traumatized by the return of the entire Sinai to Egypt between 1979 and 1982) accused Rabin of a sellout, and the religious parties were outraged over his abandonment of Judea and Samaria (the biblical terms for the West Bank). On the Palestinian side, the Islamic radicals were irate over Arafat’s betrayal, and even moderate PLO members scorned his surrender to Israel. Terrorist groups on both sides attacked the other.* In November 1995 a fanatical right-wing Israeli shot Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally. Following Israel’s assassination of a Hamas bomb maker in Gaza in January 1996 and a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel, the anti-Oslo Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister in May, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was brought to a halt.
Two years passed. In 1998 the Clinton administration attempted to revive the Oslo Accords by bringing Netanyahu and Arafat together at the Wye River plantation in rural Maryland for marathon negotiations without a positive result. Netanyahu’s successor, the renowned military leader and Labor Party head Ehud Barak, who took office in 1999 and was prepared to discuss a final settlement with Arafat, urged the US president to try again. But the return to Camp David in July 2000 failed to produce agreement on the four key issues separating the two parties: the borders of a Palestinian state, control over Jerusalem and the city’s sacred sites, the Palestinians’ right of return, and Israel’s security requirements (entailing continuing military control over the proposed Palestinian state). Arafat refused to sign.
The failure of the Camp David negotiations marked the end of the Oslo era, which had stirred hopes and fears of a breakthrough Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Both sides blamed the other for the breakdown, and scholars still debate its causes. Not unexpectedly, a second Palestinian Intifada erupted in September 2000, bringing a wave of violence to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.* In March 2001, after Barak was replaced by the hard-line Likud leader Ariel Sharon, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were again suspended.
Despite its enormous power the United States in the decade after the Madrid Conference had proved incapable of wringing enough concessions from the Israelis and Palestinians to bring them to a two-state settlement. Moreover, unlike at the first Camp David, Washington was unable to offer sufficient security guarantees to both sides to resuscitate the Oslo Accords.
Although the Cold War had ended in Europe, it persisted in the Caribbean, where US enmity against the Castro regime grew even stronger. With the termination of the Soviet-Cuban alliance, the new Russian Federation withdrew its troops and ended all subsidies to Castro. Cuba on its part repatriated all its soldiers from Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua; suspended its assistance to foreign revolutionary movements; and invited investments from abroad. But the United States remained determined to overthrow the Western Hemisphere’s sole communist regime. Accusing Havana of human rights violations and pressuring it to move toward democracy, the Clinton administration tightened the international economic boycott against Cuba but failed to topple Castro.
The legacy of the Cold War also weighed heavily on Central America, where the Superpowers had engaged in three brutal proxy wars. Although the fighting in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1980s gave way to peace agreements in the 1990s, the region faced the tasks of reconstruction and recovery along with continuing problems of urban and rural poverty and violence. Some two hundred thousand people had been killed in Central America, most of them civilians, and two million were uprooted internally or forced to flee their countries. The perpetrators were not prosecuted.
Central America emerged from its civil wars heavily dependent on international political guidance and economic assistance, which included a major role for the United Nations.* Private aid organizations provided important services, but they also failed to coordinate their agendas and may have contributed to the increase in poverty. The spread of globalization—with its emphasis on deregulation and minimal state intervention—also impaired local efforts to rebuild local and national governments, provide help to the needy, and repatriate the masses of refugees.
The United States remained the dominant figure in Central America. US aid in the 1990s centered largely on promoting large-scale, nontraditional agricultural exports (NTAEs) for the global market with heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides, which not only hurt small farmers but also damaged public health and the environment. And although the Cold War was winding down, the United States continued to intervene militarily. Bush in December 1989 used the “War on Drugs” and the goal of restoring democracy in Panama to topple a former US ally, General Manuel Noriega, and Clinton in September 1994 ordered a US occupation of Haiti to restore political order and stanch the flow of refugees to the United States.
In South America the transition from Cold War conditions had begun earlier but was equally striking. By 1990 the US-backed dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile had all disappeared, and political reforms had reduced the power of the military. In the near absence of a leftist opposition, the new regimes embraced neoliberal economic policies along with a commitment to free elections and constitutional guarantees. The defeat of Marxist guerrilla movements (most notably in Peru†) spread a mantle of peace over the continent.
Dollar diplomacy also resumed. The Washington Consensus promoted by the US Treasury, the World Bank, and the IMF called for the adoption of Western economic standards, including balanced budgets and reduced taxes, decontrolling interest and exchange rates, lowering trade barriers and attracting foreign investment, and ending subsidies and privatizing industries. This represented a major departure from the region’s historic reliance on governments to promote capital ownership and economic growth, control key industries and infrastructure, and erect tariff barriers to protect domestic industries, a program that had bogged down by the 1980s in comparison with the remarkable free-market advances in eastern and southern Asia.
Latin America’s post–Cold War development model initially proved successful: investment capital flowed into the region, and rapid growth ensued, including a dramatic rise in intraregional trade spurred by Mercosur.* However, by the latter half of the 1990s a series of financial crises shook the Southern Hemisphere. The downside of free markets was manifested by the mounting gap between rich and poor and the rise of violent crime. By the end of the twentieth century, left-wing populist movements had reappeared in many parts of South America, demanding a curb to unfettered capitalism.
For Europe, the end of the Cold War had a physical as well as a political dimension. Beginning in 1990 the double barbed-wire fences, armed guard houses, and mined strips extending some 6,800 kilometers from Finland to Greece were quickly dismantled and the continent’s physical and ideological division was no more. For eighty-two million Germans in particular, reunification ended forty years of separation between two hostile regimes and ushered in the laborious task of integrating the east into the Federal Republic’s political, judicial, and economic system. And although the feared migration of millions of easterners westward did not materialize, the end of communism made possible the emigration of over a million Jews from the former Soviet Union in the decade after 1987.
The peaceful demise of communism in Eastern Europe was shattered by the brutal civil wars in Yugoslavia. Like other East European countries, Yugoslavia in the mid-1980s had suffered an economic meltdown and enormous foreign debts along with rampant corruption. With communism now discredited, long-suppressed national rivalries resurfaced, exacerbated by Tito’s dispersion of various ethnic groups, which had created minorities throughout the country.†
Unlike the USSR, Tito’s federal, multinational Yugoslavia collapsed in violence. Fighting erupted in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia (the two most Westernized, prosperous, and anticommunist republics) declared their independence. The Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević—who controlled Yugoslavia’s federal army—sought to block them. After only ten days of fighting, Milošević agreed to free Slovenia, which had only a miniscule Serb minority. However, Croatia’s secession led to a fratricidal war because almost a third of its territory was inhabited by Serbs. In these regions, local Serbian forces (aided by the Yugoslav army) engaged in ethnic cleansing: the murder and forced deportation of Croats in the Krajina and Slavonia in order to create compact Serb strongholds within the breakaway state.*
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the next to secede, was an even greater tinderbox, consisting of roughly 44 percent Muslim Slavs (Bosnians), 33 percent Serbs, and 17 percent Croats. The Serbs, fearing Muslim domination, immediately declared their independence from the new state and created the Republika Srpska. Armed by the Yugoslav government and joined by Yugoslav troops, they waged a ferocious war on the non-Serb population, looting, killing, and setting up concentration camps, and placing the capital, Sarajevo, under a three-year siege. By the end of 1992 the Serbs controlled 70 percent of Bosnia.
Europe’s first major conflict since the end of the Cold War shook the international community. Although Bosnia’s fate involved no Great Power interests, the Serbs’ well-publicized violence stunned the public, who put pressure on their leaders to respond. In May 1992 the United Nations voted sanctions against Yugoslavia for aiding the Republika Srpska and dispatched a multinational force of seven thousand unarmed peacekeepers (UNPROFOR) to aid Bosnian civilians. In October the Security Council established a no-fly zone, banning all military flights over Bosnia. The European Community attempted to mediate: the Vance-Owen Plan in early 1993 proposed a partition of Bosnia into ten cantons (administrative subdivisions), which the ascendant Bosnian Serbs rejected.
The Clinton administration was disinclined to commit US ground forces to Bosnia after its debacle in Somalia.* US calls to enforce the no-fly zone and for air strikes against the Serbs were rebuffed by its NATO partners and Russia, the major contributors to the UNPROFOR troops, which were unwilling to expose their soldiers to Serb reprisals and opposed to encouraging the Bosnians to prolong a futile struggle. In another controversial move, the Security Council in May 1993 dispatched an additional 7,600 troops and designated six besieged Muslim enclaves as safe areas. Both sides exploited these areas for their military advantage, and the understaffed, underfunded, unarmed UN forces proved incapable of protecting civilians or avoiding being taken hostage by the Serbs.
The tide began to turn in 1994. The Bosnian government obtained arms and fought on, and Washington’s attitude toughened. On February 5, 1994, CNN television broadcast a bomb explosion in the Sarajevo central market that killed 68 and wounded 144 civilians. To stave off a retaliatory NATO airstrike, Russia engineered a Serb pullback from the capital. But the United States pushed ahead. Without consulting the UN, NATO bombers, in their first military action since 1949, attacked Serb positions, and Moscow responded with restraint.
Adding diplomacy to the use of force, the Clinton administration forged an alliance between the Croatian and Bosnian governments and formed a Croat-Muslim federation inside Bosnia. Washington also began supplying arms to the Muslim forces. Sidelining UN and European mediation efforts, Clinton in April 1994 established the five-member Contact Group, consisting of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, to bring the Bosnian Serbs to the peace table.
The war in Bosnia reached a climax in the summer of 1995. In July the Serb forces massacred some seven thousand people who had taken refuge in Srebrenica and attacked several other UN safe areas. But US-trained and armed Croatian troops, which had driven most of the Serbs out of their country, now entered Bosnia. By the end of August, NATO (over strong Russian objections) unleashed devastating air attacks against Serb military targets and communications, Croat and Muslim forces pushed the Serbs back to roughly 49 percent of the territory of Bosnia, and the chief US negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, began the negotiations with Milošević that ultimately ended the war.
The Bosnian peace talks took place in November 1995 at a US air base in Dayton, Ohio. With the UN excluded and the Contact Group acting as formal guarantors, the presidents of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia agreed to maintain Bosnia as a single, united republic but with a dual identity: a Bosnian-Croat Federation and a Bosnian Serb Republic, which would share power in all government institutions. Although Bosnia’s sovereignty had been preserved, it had been de facto partitioned and become a NATO protectorate occupied by sixty thousand foreign troops. Moreover, two of the principal terms of the Dayton Peace Agreement proved impossible to enforce: the Muslim refugees were never able to return to their homes, and the two major Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects were not apprehended for more than a decade—Radovan Karadžić in 2008 and Ratko Mladić in 2011.
The Bosnian War touched outside parties as well. For the Europeans, the massacres in Bosnia represented a grim link with their past and a warning of their post–Cold War immobility and divisions,* as well as a sign of America’s still powerful role on the continent. For the United States, which despite the public outcry had remained inactive for almost two years, and which had opposed appeasement in any form only to belatedly arrange Bosnia’s partition, the Dayton settlement represented less than a clear-cut triumph. And for Russia, the Bosnian war was an undoubted setback: heavily dependent on Western economic aid, Yeltsin had pursued a pragmatic foreign policy, serving as mediator between the Contact Group and the Serbs but also acquiescing in NATO’s military intervention in the Balkans and in its new post–Cold War role as Europe’s dominant security organization. Indeed, it was during the Bosnian War that Washington set the wheels in motion to expand the Atlantic alliance eastward to three former communist states, raising alarms and anger in Moscow.*
Four years later, NATO, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, took even stronger action. At issue was Kosovo, a province in southwestern Serbia where Albanians constituted some 82 percent of the population. Over the previous ten years Milošević had systematically eroded Kosovo’s autonomy, and the Albanians had responded with a nonviolent resistance movement. However, in 1997 a radical group, the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), had taken up arms and demanded independence, whereupon Milošević dispatched troops to crush the rebellion.
Fueled by fears of massive Albanian civilian casualties, NATO used the threat of bombing to demand a Serbian withdrawal. In February 1999 it pressured Belgrade to hold a referendum at the end of three years on the political future of Kosovo. Milošević, unwilling to surrender this mineral-rich province with its powerful ties to Serbian history, refused to allow NATO peacekeepers into Kosovo.
NATO responded swiftly. There were no plans to send ground troops to rescue the Albanians, but on March 24 NATO bombers began seventy-eight days of attacks on Serbia’s military installations and also on civilian infrastructure.† In the meantime the civil war escalated in Kosovo, resulting in some 5,000 civilian deaths and the dispersal of 860,000 Albanians, who either fled or were driven into refugee camps outside the province. Finally, with a nudge from Moscow, Milošević caved in on June 10, agreeing to withdraw his troops, permit a NATO-led force (KFOR) to disarm the local combatants and supervise the return of the refugees, and allow a UN mission to administer the province.
On the surface NATO’s action was deemed highly successful. Kosovo had been freed and now resumed its quest for independence.* Only one year later the Serbs voted Milošević out of office, and in 2001 the new Serbian government handed him over to the International Criminal Court at The Hague to stand trial. The Kosovo war, won entirely through aerial bombardment, had produced no combat casualties for NATO. Not only had the alliance worked harmoniously, but for the first time in fifty years a German government had exerted diplomatic leadership and had committed its forces offensively outside of the area, in a region scarred by its Nazi past. US secretary of state Madeleine Albright exulted that Kosovo was “simply the most important thing we have done in the world.”
But the war’s cost was also considerable. Returning to their ruined homes and villages, many Albanians took revenge on the Serbs, driving 186,000 from the province and terrorizing those who remained. A devastated Kosovo became another NATO protectorate dependent on outside donors for its economic survival. The impact of the bombing on Serbia was also considerable, including approximately five hundred civilian casualties. On May 7 an American B-2 bomber accidentally struck the Chinese embassy in downtown Belgrade, killing three, wounding another twenty, and greatly damaging relations between Washington and Beijing.†
Relations between Russia and the West also deteriorated. Moscow, no longer a partner, could neither prevent NATO’s war against Serbia nor secure an independent place in the postwar occupation of Kosovo. Russian Nationalists assailed the new Pax Americana that had extended to the Balkans. Even Gorbachev spoke out critically; he insisted that the Kosovo issue could have been solved by political means but for the “bossy US alliance” that had precipitated a military decision in order to demonstrate the “ineffectiveness of the UN and the OSCE.”‡
Some Western critics condemned NATO for collusion with KLA atrocities against the Serbs, for exaggerating the number of Albanian victims and refugees, and for subjugating Eastern Europe’s last socialist country. There were also legal objections to the Kosovo war: Clinton had ignored the US War Powers Act, and in the name of an international humanitarian emergency the NATO powers had violated the UN Charter by attacking a member state without the Security Council’s authorization and inflicted suffering on innocent Serb civilians in violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention.* On a broader scale, the war’s opponents chided NATO for making war to prevent mass murder instead of daring to secure the peace.
Even before the Cold War’s end—and after two decades of sluggish progress—the twelve-member European Community† took steps in the mid-1980s to create a stronger union. The relaunch of the European project was manifested in two significant acts: the Schengen Agreement (1985), eliminating border controls between members, and the Single European Act (1986), removing all trade barriers within six years. The next step, aired in 1988, was the establishment of a monetary union.
The fall of the Berlin Wall greatly affected the European Community. In return for French support of German unification, Chancellor Kohl had dropped all of Bonn’s objections to a common European currency. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty incorporated the strict German criteria for membership in the common currency‡ and set a 1999 deadline for its adoption, but Kohl had failed to convince Mitterrand to accept what Germany considered (and turned out to be) an essential counterpart: a political framework that would ensure the new currency’s stability. The renamed European Union (1993) admitted three new members in 1995§ and in 1999 launched the world’s first common currency—the euro—in eleven of its member states.¶ Nevertheless, as the crisis in Yugoslavia demonstrated, post–Cold War Europe still lacked a unified voice to implement a common foreign and security policy on its own.**
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe also raised the issue of European Union expansion, which the newly independent governments desired. At its Copenhagen summit in 1993 the European Union established unprecedented and exacting political, economic, and legal criteria for admission, setting the bar deliberately high to promote political stability and economic and judicial reforms by the applicants.* In the course of their arduous negotiations with EU officials, the ten candidates were compelled to alter many of their institutions and practices to meet the Copenhagen standards.† On the other hand, Turkey, a loyal NATO member that had applied in 1987, continued to be excluded along with the successor states of the USSR.
Born of the historical longings for a united Europe and forged by Franco-German reconciliation during the Cold War, the European Union in 2000 had a £93.3 billion budget, the world’s largest number of supranational institutions,‡ and a dense bureaucracy that affected the lives of some 378 million people. Nonetheless, national interests continued to dominate its decision making. Moreover, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European Union had failed to create Europeans in either spirit or behavior—as witnessed by popular opinion polls and the low turnouts in European parliamentary elections. With fading memories of World War II and of the Soviet menace that had brought Western elites together between 1957 and 1989, no external threats to promote further integration, and the prospect of a large and heterogeneous membership, the European Union’s future after the Cold War had become uncertain.
After almost a half century of Cold War, the unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union—much like imperial Germany’s collapse in 1918—left the United States faced with an unruly world. But the Clinton administration in the 1990s took no steps to forge a new multilateral form of international order—either through a revival of Roosevelt’s regional policemen or through a resuscitated United Nations. Instead, in his second inaugural address on January 20, 1997, Clinton announced his vision of global governance: “America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation.”
By the end of the 1990s the United States, with the world’s largest military and economy, had become the target not of a superpower or group of enemy states but of a radical Islamic group, Al Qaeda, which possessed no territory and operated in cells throughout the world. In 1996 its leader, Osama bin Laden, returned to Afghanistan, now controlled by a fundamentalist Taliban regime, and two years later issued a fatwa. In this Islamic-style legal pronouncement, he declared it the duty of all Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world because of US threats to Islam, including Washington’s support of its Arab allies and of Israel. In August bin Laden’s forces used truck bombs to attack the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding thousands more, and in October 2000 an Al Qaeda team attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, almost sinking the vessel and killing 17 American sailors.
The Clinton administration, aware of the threat, took countermeasures. On August 20, 1998, the president ordered retaliatory missile attacks on bin Laden’s camp near Khowst and also on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan suspected of producing chemical weapons for Al Qaeda. The air strike missed bin Laden, and the total destruction of the al-Shifa factory producing medicines for Sudan was widely condemned as a human rights violation and an intelligence failure.
Washington then turned to diplomacy. It enlisted Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the abortive effort to convince the Taliban to expel bin Laden but also won UN support for tough sanctions against the Afghan government for sheltering terrorists and forged an alliance with the anti-Taliban opposition for the purpose of capturing the Al Qaeda leader. Clinton, constrained by his predecessors’ executive orders banning the assassination of foreign leaders,* concerned over the risk of collateral damage, and hindered by disagreements between the CIA and the US military over responsibility for operations—and also embroiled in a growing personal scandal—held back from further strikes against bin Laden. His administration did thwart at least two Al Qaeda attacks against the United States and Jordan in early 2000.
In 2001, the new US president, George W. Bush, a Republican with little foreign policy experience, received some thirty-six alerts relating to Al Qaeda and bin Laden, including an August 6 CIA report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US,” but these warnings lacked specifics of time, place, method, or target. On September 11, 2001, four American passenger planes were hijacked. Two struck the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the third crashed into the Pentagon, and the fourth fell into an open field in Pennsylvania after the crew and passengers fought the hijackers.
The world reaction to the events of September 11, in which more than three thousand people from more than ninety countries died, was generally one of shock and sympathy. Church bells rang throughout Europe, tens of thousands of Beijing residents left condolences at the US embassy, firefighters in South Africa flew American flags, and children in India taped up signs that read, “This is an attack on all of us.”
The post–Cold War era had abruptly ended. On September 18 Bush signed legislation that had been approved overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress authorizing him to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks.* Two days later, in a speech to the nation, the president declared a sweeping, open-ended war on terror not only against Al Qaeda but also “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
The drumbeat to war commenced, and the US gathered allies. On September 28, three days after the Taliban government refused Washington’s request to hand over bin Laden, the United States introduced a UN Security Council resolution calling on all states “to prevent and suppress terrorist acts and take action against perpetrators,” which neither China nor Russia vetoed.† Indeed, Russian president Vladimir Putin, despite serious differences with Washington over NATO expansion and the US defense missile program, offered broad support in battling the “common enemy” of terrorism by Islamic militants, which he claimed to be facing in his attempt to suppress the uprising in Chechnya. On October 2 NATO announced that the United States had provided “clear and compelling proof” of Al Qaeda’s responsibility for the 9/11 attack and declared its readiness to join the United States in its fight—a decision that would draw the Atlantic alliance into the first out-of-area action in its history.
On October 7, 2001, Operation Enduring Freedom began. US forces launched an air and military attack on Afghanistan, supported by troops from Australia, Britain, and France, with NATO logistic assistance, and using Russian airspace for transporting men and supplies. The operation was also coordinated with the anti-Taliban forces of the Afghan United Front (Northern Alliance) and with the cooperation of the governments of Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Although bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders escaped, within two months the US-led coalition had captured the major cities, toppled the Taliban regime, and installed an interim government under the United Front leader Hamid Karzai. On December 20, 2001, the UN Security Council set up the US-led ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) to assist the Afghan government in maintaining security and expanding its authority.*
Bush, in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, warned the nation and the world that the war in Afghanistan was only the beginning of the US war on terrorism. Echoing Reagan’s 1983 charge against the Soviet Union, the president announced that United States now faced an “axis of evil” consisting of three countries—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—that sponsored terror, sought weapons of mass destruction, and endangered America and its allies. On September 22 the president announced the Bush doctrine: that the United States was free to take preemptive action against states developing weapons of mass destruction. Over the objections of Russia, China, and two key US NATO allies, France and Germany, this doctrine led to the US-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.† But after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein US forces were to remain for eight years in Iraq to quell insurgencies, tamp down on civil war, and attempt to produce a stable Iraqi government. The war in Afghanistan also continued. After the Taliban forces regrouped in the countryside, US and NATO forces attempted to protect the Karzai government, leading to the longest conflict in US history.
Since 2001 the war on terror (and terrorism)—the open-ended struggle against Al Qaeda, other militant anti-Western groups, and their rogue-state supporters—has dominated US foreign policy. Although the enemy is a new one, some Cold War elements have survived, including America’s global campaign to promote democracy but also its embrace of questionable strategic allies, its disputes with NATO over US unilateralism, and the unraveling of support from Russia and China. Washington has also abandoned several hard-won Cold War and post–Cold War agreements.*
There were domestic consequences as well. Like the US war in Vietnam, the long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq kindled opposition to the human and material costs. And because of its ubiquitous range and indefinite duration, the war on terror has once more raised legal and constitutional objections at home and abroad.
Documents
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“Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo Agreement). http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/71DC8C9D96D2F0FF85256117007CB6CA.
“Enlargement.” European Union. Last updated February 8, 2013. http://europa.eu/pol/enlarg/index_en.htm.
Milošević, Slobodan, and Ramsey Clark. The Defense Speaks: For History and the Future: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s Opening Defense Statement before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, August 31–September 1, 2004. New York: International Action Center, 2006.
“NATO 2020: Assured Security; Dynamic Engagement.” NATO. 2010. http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_63654.htm?selectedLocale=en.
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War Powers Resolution: Joint Resolution Concerning War Powers and the President. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/warpower.asp.
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Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. New York: Knopf, 2003.
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Primakov, E. M. Russian Crossroads: Toward the New Millennium. Translated by Felix Rosenthal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
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Black Snow. Directed by Fei Xie. Beijing: Beijing Youth Film Studio, 1990.
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Cabaret Balkan. Directed by Goran Paskaljevic. Bitola, Macedonia: Gradski Kina, 1998.
Chronicle of a Disappearance. Directed by Elia Suleiman. Paris: Centre National de la Cinématographie, 1996.
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Fahrenheit 9/11. Directed by Michael Moore. Los Angeles: Miramax Films, 2004.
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No. Directed by Pablo Larraín. Paris: Funny Balloons, 2012.
No Man’s Land. Directed by Danis Tanovic. Paris: Noé Productions, 2001.
Of Gods and Men. Directed by Xavier Beauvois. Paris: France 3 Cinéma, 2010.
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Wag the Dog. Directed by Barry Levinson. Los Angeles: New Line Cinema, 1997.
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Del Tredici, David, and Marc Peloquin. “Missing Towers.” Gotham Glory Complete Piano Works 1. Hong Kong: Naxos, 2012.
Penderecki, Krzysztof. Concerto per Pianoforte ed Orchestra, “Resurrection.” Mainz: Schott, 2007.
Reich, Steve, et al. WTC 9/11 Mallet Quartet; Dance Patterns. New York: Nonesuch Records, 2011, 2004.
Fiction
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DeLillo, Don. Falling Man: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2007.
Hirvonen, Elina. When I Forgot. Translated by Douglas Robinson. Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2009.
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Pamuk, Orhan. Snow. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Saramago, José. Blindness. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. New York: Harcourt, 1998.
Yehoshua, Abraham B. The Liberated Bride. Translated by Hillel Halkin. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003.
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* A means of overcoming censorship, samizdat (self-published) tracts—either handwritten or typed and reproduced on mimeograph or hidden copying machines—had been passed from hand to hand.
† SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome).
* There is some evidence of Al Qaeda involvement in the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993.
* Regions within their own spheres of influence: the Western Hemisphere for the United States, the former Soviet Republics for Russia.
† The seven members who voted against were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen.
‡ Under US pressure the court’s reach has been limited to citizens of states accepting its jurisdiction and to cases referred by the UN Security Council.
* The Russian Duma, irritated over NATO’s expansion and its bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 and especially over US insistence on the option of building a national missile defense system (in violation of the ABM treaty), delayed ratification of START II, which was then superseded by the SORT (Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty), concluded in 2001 between presidents Bush and Putin.
† The Soviet Union’s collapse had isolated its Vietnamese client, forcing Hanoi to accept a settlement dictated by the United States and China: a cease-fire supervised by UN peacekeeping forces and UN-monitored elections that led to the restoration of the monarchy under King Sihanouk—only to be toppled in 1997 by a coup that placed Hun Sen (a communist and former Khmer Rouge soldier) in power.
* On the US side, these included revelations in 1999 of Chinese espionage at US nuclear facilities and Beijing’s repression of political and religious dissidents and its harsh rule in Tibet; on the Chinese side there was opposition to US proposals to construct an antimissile system in Japan and America’s continued commitment to Taiwan as well as outrage over the accidental bombing of the PRC’s Belgrade embassy during NATO’s 1999 war against Serbia.
† As part of its disarmament arrangements with the Soviet Union, the United States had removed all its tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991.
* Cuba, although outwardly defiant over Moscow’s endorsement of the accords, was also ready to liquidate a long, costly, and seemingly unwinnable military mission, especially having gained the prestige of contributing to the liberation of Namibia and removing South African troops from Angola.
† One of the most striking developments in the new South Africa was the 1995 creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose purpose was to examine human rights abuses under the Apartheid regime between 1960 and 1994, formulate proposals for reparation and rehabilitation of the victims, and examine petitions for amnesty by the accused. After hearing testimonies from over twenty-one thousand victims in venues throughout South Africa (many of which were broadcast over national television), the commission concluded its work with a 3,500-page report in October 1998. Despite some criticisms of the TRC’s effectiveness, this countermodel to the Nuremberg Trials has been emulated elsewhere.
* Among the more prominent victims was de Klerk’s ex-wife, Marike, who on December 4, 2001, was found stabbed and strangled to death in her Cape Town flat, the victim of a twenty-one-year-old security guard.
† Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States had supported the coalition, while the PLO, Jordan, and Libya backed Iraq.
* Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) was an offshoot of the Egyptian organization the Muslim Brotherhood.
† Rabin and Arafat as well as Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who played a major role in the Oslo negotiations.
* On February 25, 1994, a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, opened fire on Arab worshippers in the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125, setting off riots throughout the West Bank. The Israeli government and Jewish religious leaders condemned the attack, but Goldstein’s deed was celebrated by Oslo’s opponents.
* There is considerable evidence that Arafat preplanned the Second Intifada to reassert the PLO’s leadership over the disgruntled Palestinians and cover Camp David’s failure, but a few PLO spokesmen have insisted that it was a spontaneous response to Likud candidate Ariel Sharon’s provocative September 28 visit to the Temple Mount complex in Jerusalem (accompanied by one thousand security guards) for the purpose of asserting Jewish control over a sacred Muslim site (where the Dome of the Rock shrine and the Al-Aqsa mosque are located).
* In El Salvador in particular, where it monitored the implementation of the peace accords and investigated the activity of the notorious death squads.
† Where the Maoist Shining Path, which had waged guerrilla warfare throughout the 1980s, was defeated in 1992.
* Founded in 1990 by Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, which Chile joined in 1996.
† The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consisted of six republics, three religions, and a mixture of South Slavs, Albanians, Hungarians, and several smaller minorities. Among them, Serbia and Montenegro contained largely Orthodox Christian Slavs; Slovenia and Croatia largely Catholic Slavs (but the latter with a substantial Serb minority); Bosnia-Herzegovina was a mixed region of Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic Slavs; and Macedonia was a mixed region of Orthodox Christian Slavs and Muslim Albanians. There were also two autonomous regions within Serbia, where the division fell along ethnic lines: Kosovo (Orthodox Christian Slavs and Muslim Albanians) and the Vojvodina (Orthodox Christian Serbs and Protestant and Catholic Hungarians).
* The civil war in Croatia lasted until 1995, when government forces captured the Serb-held territories and drove out much of the Serbian population.
* Under President Bush twenty-five thousand US troops had been sent to Somalia to support a UN relief mission. But in March 1993 the Clinton administration had changed the mission and involved US soldiers in the Somalian civil war. When US casualties mounted and the American public protested, the president reversed course in October, announcing a total withdrawal, which was completed by March 1994.
* During the course of the Bosnian War, France and Britain had supported Russia in opposing military action against the Bosnian Serbs, and Germany had stood with the United States in opposing a partition of Bosnia.
* In 1999, after considerable debate within NATO and over Russian objections, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the Western alliance, followed, in 2004, by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.
† Including bridges, factories, power stations, telecommunication facilities, the state television offices and broadcasting tower, and the headquarters of Yugoslavia’s leftist party as well as oil refineries and chemical plants.
* Which was declared in 2008 over Russian and Serbian objections.
† The official explanation was that US intelligence had misidentified the embassy as the Yugoslav Bureau of Federal Supply and Procurement and placed it on the list of approved targets, but critics suspected a deliberate hit, either to thwart communications or possibly to catch Milošević at this site.
‡ The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, successor to the CSCE.
* Some Western military observers were also unimpressed with the alliance’s performance, particularly its decision-by-consensus arrangements that hindered the bombing campaign, the Europeans’ military unpreparedness, several weaknesses in the US arsenal, and NATO’s vulnerability to the Serbs’ low-tech defense strategies.
† In additional to the six founding members, the following had joined: Denmark, Ireland, and Britain in 1973; Greece in 1981; and Portugal and Spain in 1986.
‡ Including low inflation and long-term interest rates, stable exchange rates, budget deficits less than 3 percent of GDP, and government debt less than 3 percent of GDP, as well as the establishment of an independent European Central Bank to exert control over the monetary policies of member states.
§ The former Cold War neutrals Austria, Finland, and Sweden.
¶ Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Greece, late in meeting the Maastricht criteria, joined in 2001. Britain, Denmark, and Sweden opted to stay out.
** For example, the two EU members, Britain and France, that hold permanent seats on the UN Security Council generally cast votes according to their national interests.
* (1) “Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities”; (2) a “functioning market economy with the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union”; and (3) the ability to “fulfill all EU laws and treaties governing trade, farm subsidies, monetary union, the environment, health and safety, energy, transport, justice, etc.”
† The ten that entered the European Union together in May 2004 were: (Greek) Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
‡ Including the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice, the European Central Bank, and the European Court of Auditors.
* Originating in the post-Watergate congressional investigations of secret CIA assassination attempts, they had been issued by Carter, Ford, and Reagan.
* The Bush administration had submitted this bill in accordance with the November 7, 1973, War Powers Resolution, passed by a two-thirds congressional vote, which overrode Nixon’s veto and was designed to curb presidential power to commit US troops without congressional authorization and review. In ordering US military action in Central America and the Caribbean in the 1980s and in the Balkans in the 1990s, both Reagan and Clinton had ignored this resolution.
† However, this resolution was not an authorization to go to war under Article 51 of the UN Covenant.
* Over which NATO assumed responsibility in October 2003.
† In which the United States was joined by Britain, Australia, and Poland.
* Among them the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former USSR and also the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, the Land Mines Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Protocol.