ABSTRACT
The shock to the international state system caused by the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989 is a root cause of the instability now endemic in global politics. The bi-polar architecture of the Cold War world fixed all power relations in their place from the Second World War until the East European revolutions. The US is now attempting to create a new imperial order, but the process is contested and dangerous. This is a seismic shift in the landscape of world politics. If we
were to reach for historical parallels then only the rise of European colonialism up to the First World War or the fall of the Iron Curtain across Europe after the Second World War would be appropriate in scale and consequence. To fully grasp this enormity a review of Cold War imperial rivalry is necessary.
