Introduction

The collapse of the Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact, which resulted in the demise of the bi-polar global system, gave rise, in some Western quarters, to the idea that a vacuum had occurred in global geopolitics. The unprecedented success of the US-led Western response to the Kuwait crisis of 1990–91 seems to have encouraged some US politicians to proclaim the New World Order of a single-polar system in the form of a pyramid of hierarchy of powers with the United States at its top playing the role of ultimate global arbiter. Some of these men have openly advocated US military domination of the globe as the only way of ensuring global stability. Charles Krauthammer, for instance, contended, in the early 1990s, that the best hope for global safety and security lay ‘in American strength and will – the strength and will to lead a uni-polar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce it’. ¹