ABSTRACT
In the period 1989-1991, the Cold War came to a somewhat sudden and unexpected end and, with it, the bipolar U.S.–USSR global competition for bases also ended. The Soviet external basing structure – Cuba, Vietnam, Syria, Angola, Mozambique, Algeria, Guinea, Ethiopia, Mongolia et al. – collapsed almost completely, leaving small remnants only in Georgia and Kyrghizstan. British and French overseas access had already been diminished in consonance with the withering of remnant colonial assets, leaving islands such as Ascension and Diego Garcia in the former case, and a few places in Africa such as Djibouti in the latter. What remained in a system now perhaps to be characterized as largely unipolar, was a still very extensive if a bit reduced and modified U.S. basing structure, leaving the U.S. to appear as a virtual colossus with an unrivalled and unparalleled structure of global access, now added to by bases in Eastern Europe and former Soviet “socialist republics” in Central Asia.1
