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.Thesebackground conditions are linked to the end of the Cold War and the rise ofmegaterrorism in the twenty-first century especially the collapse of bipolarity,the loss of a capacity to maintain order within bloc limits, and the recalculation ofpower relations in a postmodern geopolitics in which the dominant state isdeeply challenged by a concealed multistate terrorist network, and at the sametime finds itself unchallenged and undeterred by rival states.This new set ofcircumstances makes unipolarity plausible as a sequel to bipolarity, at least in thedomain of security, but paradoxically not nearly as effective in sustainingstability and avoiding warfare.Polarities are measures that presupposeterritorial states as the parties to conflict, and thus are subject to deterrence,containment, and defense.Such reasoning does not apply to the al Qaedanetwork, and thus unipolarity is not capable of delivering postmodern globalsecurity, and cannot even protect the homeland of the imperial overlord of thesystem.Unipolarity was initially disappointing to its advocates, partly as a result of aperception by political leaders in the 1990s of a greatly diminished domain ofstrategic interests.The ineffectuality of the unipolar actor also reflected theinternal pressures exerted by the American citizenry on its government toREGIONALISM " 47address domestic priorities, as well as a wariness about global engagements, as innation-building, that could be costly and yet earned few material dividends.Briefly, the Gulf War (1991) epitomized the early post-Cold War perception ofthe persistence of hegemonic stability; after all, here was a successfulgeopolitical undertaking that proceeded by fully instrumentalizing the UN, and inthe process even generating universalistic claims of  a new world orderlegitimized through collective security mechanisms.Soon after the victory overIraq in 1991, it became evident that this  unipolar moment was to be brief, andthat the idealistic commitment to collective security under UN auspices that hadbeen so loudly proclaimed a few months earlier was abandoned without even awhimper of explanation (Krauthammer, 1990 1991).The Gulf War was aconflict subject to the modernist logic of a world of sovereign states, whereinweight of unipolarity, especially in relation to military capabilities, could beexerted to control the political outcome.In the Bush II presidency, abandoning the positive achievements of the 1990shas become doctrinal and accompanied by a seemingly perverse effort to undomany of the most promising initiatives of the prior decade these includeenhancing human rights, protecting peoples facing severe abuse from their owngovernment, and supporting criminal accountability for leaders who commitcrimes against humanity and other international crimes, and who breach generalframeworks of multilateral diplomacy in relation to weaponry of massdestruction and environmental protection.Seemingly, September 11 hasgenerated a second unipolar moment, one focused on the war/peace dimension ofinternational society which, in some unresolved fashion, seems to pit both alQaeda and the United States against the rest of international society, but in apostmodern framework that cannot be understood by reference to conflictresolution as it proceeded in the modern period of statist geopolitics.Why were the 1990s crises in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Rwanda treated asso much less deserving of a response from the global community than was theIraqi invasion of Kuwait (Weiss, 1994; Barnett, 2002; Melvern, 2000)? Theparamount explanations are, of course, oil and civilizational identities, but alsothe supposed regional security threat posed by a militant Iraq, likely to possessnuclear weapons within years, to a strategically, namely Israel, as well as to astrategic region, the Middle East.It is unlikely that the Gulf Crisis would haveerupted in the bipolar world of the Cold War, the dynamics of mutual deterrenceinducing greater prudence with respect to obvious strategic interests, as well as areluctance of either side to challenge the geopolitical status quo.Such restraint wasoperationalized during the Cold War by the capacity of the superpowers to exerteffective control to prevent unwanted initiatives undertaken by secondary statessuch as Iraq, as well as by the high stakes of a loss of control associated withrisks of warfare conducted with nuclear weaponry (Wallerstein, 2002) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]