ABSTRACT
What caused the Cold War to end so abruptly? Gaddis has pointed out with ill-disguised relish the failure of international relations theory to predict its demise and the intellectual bankruptcy that this appeared to display.1 And if theorists could not predict its end, what credence should we give to their hastily concocted and often mutually contradictory explanations about what caused it? For example, the two most common but seriously incompatible answers are: it was a carefully crafted victory by the US; and, it was the result of internal corrosion of the Soviet system with Gorbachev acting as a catalyst for further decay rather than for the renewal that he intended. While bearing these cautionary observations in mind, we nevertheless need to examine the different perceptions about why the Cold War ended, not least because they influence answers to the following cluster of questions. Was the world now unipolar? Was it threatened by a ‘clash of civilisations’? Was it a ‘back-to-thefuture’ scenario of less stable multipolarity? Was it a world in which US relative power would continue to diminish as many had suggested it would in the late 1970s and early 1980s? What would now be more important to the US, hard military and economic, or soft economic, cultural and normative power?2
