Chapter 11.4 Ongoing Problems and Solutions
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Describe threats to western peace and security since the end of the Cold War
- Identify some consequences of migration and refugee resettlement in Europe and the United States
- Identify recent and current threats to human rights, including the continued war in Ukraine
- Analyze the effects on poorer nations of the increasing division between the Global North and the Global South
On February 24, 2022, the world watched in horror and frustration as Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border and began bombing cities around the former Soviet republic. This was the second time in fewer than ten years that Russian troops had invaded the nation. In 2014, Russian forces had annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. While both invasions were decades in the making, to many they seemed like a rerun of a bygone era. Those who had watched Soviet tanks roll into Budapest and Prague to quell uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s saw the invasion of 2014 and the violence of 2022 as a reminder that some problems, no matter how far in the past, remain unresolved.
Instability in the Post–Cold War World
When the Soviet Union dissolved on December 31, 1991, most in the West celebrated the end of the Cold War, believing that a new world that would uniformly embrace liberal democracy and capitalism was in the process of being born. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama even published a book on the idea in 1992 called The End of History and the Last Man. The argument presented in the book was that the world had been marching toward a Western liberal democratic future for centuries, and with the Soviet Union gone, it had reached the inevitable end of its “ideological evolution.” With the United States as the only remaining superpower, many also assumed the Cold War’s bipolar world would soon evolve into a mostly unipolar one based on U.S. military, cultural, and economic dominance.
With this idea in mind, U.S. president Bill Clinton drafted a foreign policy platform geared to revising and expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the alliance for mutual defense forged by the United States and other Western democracies during the Cold War. Clinton aimed to strengthen relationships with post–Soviet Russia, and address ethnic and political strife in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, and Latin America These goals occasionally required using the country’s military, such as in 1995 when Clinton sent a force of twenty thousand to the Balkans as part of a NATO operation to enforce a cease-fire and protect upcoming elections.
One of the most pressing concerns for the United States and the world, however, was the need to secure the thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons then installed in thousands of sites around Eurasia. Many were in states that had separated from the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Because these countries were