Author: Dr David Jablonsky
Sometime in the penultimate decade of the 20th century, the United States and its allies won the cold war. Once again in the current transition period, the primary questions revolve around the management of power and America’s role in global politics. Once again there are the issues of change and continuity. In terms of change, the cold war set in train a blend of integrative and disintegrative forces and trends that are adding to the complex tensions of the current transition. The integrative force that increasingly linked global economies in the cold war, for instance, also holds out the spectral potential of global depression or, at the very least, nations more susceptible to disintegrative actions, as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait demonstrated. In a similar manner, the advances in communications and transportation that have spread the results of medical and scientific discoveries around the world are countered by the malign transnational results of nuclear technology, the drug trade, terrorism, AIDS and global warming.