ABSTRACT
During the intervening years, since the collapse of Soviet Communism pronounced the functional end of the twentieth century, the international community has enjoyed the luxury of thinking less about the nuclear issue than it did during the preceding five decades of the Cold War. Now the ‘interregnum’ is ending – the new era beginning in the minds of many on 11 September 2001, although this book has suggested that the qualitative changes predate the terrorist attack in America – and with it, that luxury. The interregnum is coming – sadly but not unexpectedly – to be seen as a period of lost opportunities. Survey the surface level of conventional politics only that have appeared earlier in this book. The golden moment with Russia was wasted; the European project may be in jeopardy, haemorrhaging from wounds self-inflicted over the Balkans; deluded by the false promise of ‘conflict resolution’, the Middle East is back at the brink; the Indian sub-continent is firmly, visibly, nuclearised; the crises in west, north-eastern, central and southern Africa do not cease to deepen; Japan stumbles into twilight; Indonesia may fall apart and China may become both politically and culturally more
alienated by the manner in which it is being approached by a more truculently unilateralist United States foreign policy. The discovery of a theoretical common cause in opposition to Islamic terrorism may moderate that Chinese alienation, although that is yet to be seen; but the assumption of a new world role by the USA in the fight against terrorism has no effect upon the unilateralist tendency.
