The ‘Post Cold War‘ Always Was A SCAM

## Reassessing the "Post‑Cold War" Label What emerges from the conversation is a simple but consequential claim: the phrase “post‑Cold War” has always been a conceptual placeholder rather than a clear historical period. Calling the last three decades “post” something presumes that history has been bracketed between two clear events, but it also keeps alive the expectation that another defining rupture will inevitably arrive. The discussion reframes that unease by arguing we should stop treating 1991–2022 as an amorphous interval and instead recognize it for what it functionally was: a unipolar moment. That reformulation is not mere semantics. It changes how we interpret policy choices, geopolitical realignments, and the politics of memory. If we name what we lived through accurately, we stand a better chance of understanding how it ended and what might follow. This argument about periodization matters because period names do analytical work. They shape narratives: which actors count as central, which crises appear systemic, and which continuities are concealed. “Post‑Cold War” hides the fact that for three decades a particular hierarchical arrangement prevailed—U.S. predominance across military, economic, cultural, and normative spheres. Calling that interval “the unipolar moment” foregrounds a causal story: global politics were ordered around a single dominant power, and that ordering made certain strategies intelligible while marginalizing others. This reframing allows us to assess the era’s policies not as the default after the Cold War but as the product of deliberate, contingent dynamics that produced both beneficiaries and dissenters. ## The Unipolar Moment: What It Looked Like The conversation maps out the unipolar moment in measurable terms. Militarily, the United States retained unmatched expeditionary capabilities and a global network of bases and alliances. Economically, Western financial institutions and markets set many of the rules of international exchange and capital flows. Culturally and ideologically, liberal democracy and market capitalism enjoyed widespread normative prestige, even where adoption was partial or contested. These combined advantages meant that for several decades, the U.S. could reliably set agendas, broker coalitions, and secure acquiescence for interventions that would have provoked more durable resistance in a more balanced world. Yet the unipolar moment was not complete hegemony. The conversation rightly highlights that other states did not simply accept U.S. primacy as permanent. They negotiated within it, sometimes benefitting from the order, sometimes chafing at its constraints. The description of Russia’s and China’s reactions to interventions in the 1990s and 2000s illustrates that even then, countervailing behavior existed—ranging from pragmatism and selective cooperation to institutional and doctrinal resistance like the formation of alternative groupings. In short, the unipolar moment was a dominant but contested configuration. Recognizing that contingency avoids teleological readings that treat unipolarity as a natural or inevitable stage. ## 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Limits of Systemic Change A major analytic thread in the conversation is the treatment of the War on Terror as both transformative and limited. On one level, the campaigns launched after 9/11 reshaped state practice—counterterrorism became a central organizing theme of Western foreign policy, producing long wars, new surveillance regimes, and expansive legal doctrines. At the same time, the discussion points out that these developments did not constitute the sort of systemic reordering that redefines the architecture of international relations. Wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere were cataclysmic regionally and morally catastrophic in their consequences, but they did not dismantle the underlying structures of global power or displace the United States as the core pole of world politics. That duality explains why many observers continued to call the era “post‑Cold War” even after 2001. The War on Terror was a profound policy shift; it was not, the conversation contends, a foundational change in the balance of global capabilities. This matters for how we interpret historical causation. Treating 9/11 as the end of an era elevates one type of violence into a structural break, potentially obscuring longer, slower trends—economic realignments, state rebuilding, technological diffusion, and the reassertion of non‑Western powers—that eventually eroded unipolarity. The conversation insists on attention to both immediate shocks and incremental transformations when diagnosing epochal change. ## The Return of Great Power Politics and the Rise of Multipolarity Where the conversation becomes decisive is in claiming that a new phase—best described as multipolar or multinodal—has now taken shape. The recovery and reassertion of Russia, the rapid and systemic rise of China, and the growing agency of other regional powers (India, Turkey, Iran, Brazil and others) produce a configuration where several centers of gravity can independently set agendas. This is not merely a distribution of military hardware; it is a diffusion of economic influence, alternative governance models, and new institutional forms that allow non‑Western states to say “no” to Western prescriptions and to coordinate among themselves. The conversation underscores that multipolarity is not simply the mirror image of bipolar rivalry. It is a more complex topology of overlapping blocs, issue‑specific coalitions, and resilience in regional spheres of influence. That complexity offers both risks and opportunities: risks in the sense that miscalculations and competing local orders can produce localized wars and systemic spillovers; opportunities insofar as no single power monopolizes agenda setting, which opens space for negotiation, pluralism, and new instruments of collective management. Recognizing the return of great power competition does not commit us to fatalism about inevitable global conflagration. Instead, it requires recalibrating strategies that were designed for unipolarity. ## Memory, Periodization, and Political Stakes The conversation persuasively links periodization to political stakes. How we remember the last three decades shapes politics today. Describing the interval as a mere hiatus between Cold Wars permits a narrative of relapse: things were stable under U.S. leadership, then reckless actors wrecked order, and now we must choose sides. By contrast, calling it the unipolar moment emphasizes systemic imbalance as the norm during that period and frames the current era as a potential corrective—or a new instability depending on choices. This is not neutral historiography; it influences policymaking, domestic politics, and the kinds of public goods international actors prioritize. There is also an ethical dimension. The conversation calls attention to the human costs obscured by grand narratives. Treatments that center great power rivalry can underplay the devastation of non‑hegemonic spaces—those ravaged by prolonged interventions, economic sanctions, or proxy competition. Reframing the era in terms of unipolarity forces a reckoning with the distributional consequences of global order: who benefited from the old rules, who paid the costs, and how historical grievances fuel present alignments. Memory, then, is not simply about getting dates right; it is about whose suffering is visible and whose agency is recognized. ## Possibilities Ahead: Concert, Competition, or Catastrophe? Finally, the conversation gestures toward futures rather than foreclosing them. If the unipolar moment has ended, what comes next is not predetermined. The specter of a “Second Cold War” or a protracted Third World War is one plausible path, especially if great power competition hardens into existential rivalry and global institutions fragment. But the conversation also of

The ‘Post Cold War‘ Always Was A SCAM I have always been uncomfortable with the designation of the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘Post-Cold War.’ It struck me as a very temporary expression to refer to the current world, since anything that is ‘post’ must necessarily be ‘ante’ something else. History never ends. In a really interesting way, it seems that most intellectuals, politicians, academics etc. who used this term to refer to ‘our time’ implicitly agreed to the sandwiched nature of this period. Something else must be coming which will recast the current ‘post’ period—but what would that be? And in what form will it force us to rethink the ’Post-Cold War’? For a time it seemed that the inflection point—the ‘Post Post- Cold War’—so to speak had come in 2001 with the events of 9/11 and the onset of the so called ‘War on Terror’ that unleashed not only a war on a few middle-eastern crime syndicates, but ultimately ended up laying waste to large parts of West Asia and Northern Africa. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and—of course—the leftovers of Palestine. However, people continued using the term ‘Post-Cold War”’ to refer also to this period. Looking at it now, it also becomes clear why. We intuitively understood that although the War on Terror was a ‘thing’ in some sense, it was not in another. Although it was an over-arching goal of foreign policy—especially in the West but supported also by Russia and China, as well as in many parts of the Global South– it was not a systemic change. It was an approach at reframing foreign policy priorities, but it did not carry with it a new way of how the globe was organized politically. It wasn’t something that shook the fundamental setup of how things run in world politics the way the great periods of the past did. My fear over the past ten years was that one day we would be remembering the two or three decades after 1991 as something like the ‘Second Inter-War,’ if, indeed, a Third World War will be what ends the period. Some scholars like Dmitri Trenin argue that we are, in fact, already in this Third World War—albeit this time the warfare being of a different nature than the two preceding moments of global mass-violence. Others have started speaking of a ‘Second Cold War’ to refer to what we are in since the start of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine (the framing of which must be the subject of another essay). The bad news is that both conceptions might still proof themselves to be how we will remember this new period. Whichever it will be, it seems that slowly a consensus is setting in on what this new period of global confrontation means for the by-gone ‘Post-Cold War’. First, we finally have an endpoint. We can neatly wrap this 30-year period between December 1991 and February 2022. Secondly, over the past years, papers and discussions about the nature of the confrontation are converging around the interpretation that the new global order is one that is best described as ‘multipolar’ (or ‘multi-nodal’, as the eminent US diplomat Chas Freeman argues). #Pascal Hello everybody. Let's talk for a second about the shift we are going through, not only in world politics but in the way we remember the past 30 years. There is a very interesting change taking place, actually, in how we talk about what we used to call the post-Cold War era, and I would like to -- 1 of 4 -- make a suggestion. Let's begin, maybe, with the appreciation that overall, memory is a pretty funny thing. We often think of memory as something fixed, permanent, and unchanging, but actually it isn't. Just think about how the Second World War reshaped the way we remember earlier decades. Suddenly, the Great War turned into the First World War. And the post-war years of the 1920s and '30s became the interwar period. So events, especially violent events, tend to reframe what came before them as well. And the same thing is happening to our so-called post-Cold War period. I was always uncomfortable with that term, "post-Cold War," because it sounded so temporary, fragile, like a placeholder, and a bit, you know, like something in between—a sandwich—because everything "post" is also necessarily "ante" something else, since history doesn't end, right? Even Francis Fukuyama didn't think so. The title of his famous essay was actually alluding to that, and not to a period. So, in a way, most intellectuals, politicians, and academics who used the term "post-Cold War" were admitting exactly that. They were acknowledging that this was a sandwiched period, that something else must be coming. The question just was, and to some extent still is, what it would be and what form it would force us to rethink this so-called post-Cold War. Now, for a while, it looked like the turning point had come already in 2001, with the attacks on the Twin Towers—9/11 and so on—and the launch of the War on Terror. I mean, we all remember the famous War on Terror, right? And let's be clear, this wasn't just about hunting down a few Middle Eastern terrorist groups. It ended up laying waste to an entire region—large parts of West Asia and North Africa. I maybe don't even need to list them here, but Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and, of course, whatever is left of Palestine. And even that part is currently being destroyed, being exterminated. But even then, people still kept using this label of "post-Cold War." And looking back now, it's also clear why. Because as big as the War on Terror was, it wasn't actually systemic. Yes, it shaped foreign policy. Yes, it consumed resources and attention. But it did not reorder world politics. It didn't create a new architecture of international relations. It was never on the scale of a true systemic shift. For the past decade, I've had a fear, though, and that's that one day we would look back at the years after 1991 as something like the second interwar period—a time between two cataclysms, if indeed a third world war is what ends it all. And some scholars are already actually saying that. Dmitri Trenin, for example, argues that we are already in the Third World War—this time, though, in hybrid ways rather than with mass armies—and that some parts of that war would be cold, while others would be hot, and that it would be an extended period, but that it would require an all-out war effort, especially from Russia. Now, others prefer to call what's currently going on a Second Cold War, especially since Russia's special military operation in Ukraine began. And I will link a video that I already did about the arguments of Dmitry Trenin. So the bad news is that either of these two framings—that of a Third World War or a new Cold War—might turn out to be right. But even so, something else has become clearer now that we have something of an -- 2 of 4 -- endpoint to the post-Cold War. We can now close the book on that 30-year stretch between 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and February 2022, the start of the war in Ukraine. That was the real bracket of the period we used to call the post-Cold War. When we look at it carefully, what really defined those years was not just the absence of a Cold War; it was the presence of something else: the unipolar moment. This label actually fits much better because for roughly 30 years, the United States stood at the very top of the system—relatively unrivaled militarily, economically, culturally, and ideologically. No one else came close, and the rest of the world adapted to that fact. If you just look at the reactions of Russia and China toward the wars in Yugoslavia, and how they even tended to go along with the war on terror—even Russia and China as well—and how the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization actually contained a very, very strong element of this war on terror in the way that the SCO frames its own security component, and so on and so forth. There was no large systemic opposition to what was going on back then. The new world now is different, though. We see how large pushbacks are coming from the Global South, from China, from Russia, and how the West is simply not able anymore to push through the framings it has of what world politics is about and how it should be organized. Of course, realist scholars had been warning us for years, right, that unipolarity never lasts. Power attracts counterpower, and eventually rivals emerge. John Mearsheimer, in particular, made a career out of showing the tragic logic of great power politics. And sure enough, he was right. China rose, Russia recovered, and other actors—India, Iran, Turkey, Brazil—began charting their own paths. By 2022, it was undeniable that this unipolar moment, with democratic power concentration in the West, especially in Washington, had ended. That leaves us with the question: what actually does come next? The consensus now forming is that we are entering a multipolar world, or as the American diplomat Chas Freeman says, a multinodal order. That means several centers of power—civilizational, cultural, technological, and military—now have the ability not to simply follow the West's lead, but to chart the course forward and manage interactions with each other independently. They can and do say no to the West. If we zoom out, the picture gets even clearer. In just three generations, we have actually lived through the bipolarity of the Cold War, the unipolarity of the post-Cold War—what we now call the unipolar moment, I would suggest—and the multipolarity of today. So why does it matter that we reframe the post-Cold War as the unipolar moment? On the one hand, because "post-Cold War" was vague. It just described what came after something else. But more importantly, the "unipolar moment" tells us what it actually was about, and it also leaves open the question of what comes next. If we insist on calling today's period the Second Cold War or a Second Interwar, we almost doom ourselves to repeating those tragedies. But if we see the last 30 years as a unipolar moment, then the future is still unwritten. Maybe it doesn't have to be a Third World War. Maybe it doesn't have to be a Second World War. With some luck and some serious diplomacy, maybe it could be something else entirely. Maybe, with a little bit of luck, even a new concert system—a global balance of power that avoids catastrophe. -- 3 of 4 -- -- 4 of 4 --