ABSTRACT
The powerful images of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 hold their place as an iconic and peaceful transition of the twentieth century. The rapid and revolutionary disintegration of the East German regime triggered a process that quickly led to Germany's unification. These political events had historic military and geostrategic ramifications. The US Navy suddenly neither a peer naval competitor nor a superior maritime adversary. At the outset of the first post-Cold War decade, because the antagonist was gone, the US Navy was not necessarily out of business. The bipolar order of the Cold War was replaced by a consolidating and increasingly economically interdependent system that had emerged slowly over the past decades and now integrated fiercely. The major conflicts, crises, and wars of the decade reflected such challenges. The US intervention in Panama in December 1989, in the shadows of the geostrategic events in progress in Central and Eastern Europe, was a relatively minor incursion.
