ABSTRACT
A number of American scholars, policymakers and observers across the ideological spectrum were quick to argue that the post-Cold War order represented a unipolar moment in history, in which the United States not only could but should lead the world. In the months building up to full-scale military action in Iraq, US President George H. W. Bush articulated his administration's own version of a post-Cold War Pax Americana under the auspicious heading of a New World Order. Brands has rightly pointed out that, viewed as a whole, the New World Order narrative was vague, inconsistent and mainly deployed to offer a moral justification for war in Iraq, rendering it difficult for Bush's foreign policy team to operationalise it in wider contexts. The election of the George H. W. Bush administration in the US in 1988 and its subsequent talk of the initiation of a New World Order, Gorbachev saw his opportunity to push for membership of the two Bretton Woods organisations.
