ABSTRACT
Major structural changes in the international system in the late 1980s presented the US with fresh leadership challenges in the area of foreign policy. The peaceful end of the Cold War and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 came as a considerable surprise to many observers in the West who had been accustomed to thinking of international relations as essentially a power struggle between competing blocs of sovereign states. The post-Cold War world was subject to deepening globalization. Globalization implies a shift in geography whereby borders have become increasingly porous. At the beginning of the 1990s, the foreign policy orientation of the US seemed to be located somewhere between the views of the skeptics and transformationalists. The controversial humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1992-93 was a paradigm of the emerging security environment. The Somali operation proved to be a profound disappointment for the US.
