The Bush administration and the ‘end’ of the cold war: a critical geopolitics of U.S. foreign policy in 1989

Abstract

It is commonplace to suggest that the Cold War ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Eastern European dictatorships. Implicitly this view assumes that the Cold War was fundamentally about Soviet control of Eastern Europe. It also ignores the Cold War nature of U.S. foreign policy in 1989. This paper outlines a more comprehensive definition of the Cold War as a geopolitical system made up of two different geopolitical orders, an American-organized order and a Soviet-dominated order. The structures of the Soviet geopolitical order began to collapse in 1989 but the structures of the American geopolitical order remained in place. Using a critical geopolitics perspective, one which focuses on the geopolitical ‘scripts’ used by foreign policy élites, the Cold War nature of U.S. foreign policy towards the Soviet Union and Europe in 1989 is documented. U.S. foreign policy did evolve and change in 1989 but it continued to legitimate U.S. militarism, Cold War alliances, and U.S. power projection in the Third World. Yet the Cold War as a geopolitical system began to lose its meaning as a consequence of the events of 1989. The persistence of the structures of the American geopolitical order after the Cold War and their attempted relegitimation in the Gulf crisis of 1990–1991 has now left an important disjuncture between economic realities and geopolitical authority in the post-Cold War era. This is one factor contributing to the ‘new world disorder’.