Conflict in the Post–Cold War Era

Abstract

In this chapter, I illustrate the mechanisms through which unipolarity produces conflict that I developed in the previous chapter. Since the Soviet collapse, Washington has chosen to implement a military strategy of defensive or offensive dominance, maintaining a significant security presence in the most important regions of the world. At the same time, the United States has experienced a period of unusually high involvement in military conflicts. In addition to conducting numerous smaller scale operations, U.S. forces have been involved in major operations in Kuwait (1991), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001–), and Iraq (2003–2011). In each of these cases, the pathway to war highlights the role of power preponderance in generating significant levels of conflict between an engaged preponderant power and recalcitrant minor powers. The last two-and-a-half decades of U.S. history, in sum, give us good reason to look further into the causes of conflict in a unipolar world. Furthermore, although we have no historical experience of a globally disengaged preponderant power, the arguments deployed in favor of a U.S. global presence often include predictions for what would happen should Washington decide to end its security commitments around the world. The picture is one of frequent conflict among other states, largely mirroring the theoretical case I presented in the previous chapter on the consequences of disengagement, providing indirect support for the plausibility of my theory.