ABSTRACT
In order to grasp disagreement among historians, one needs to look beyond the superpower conflict itself and see what broader developments made the Cold War less important within international politics. The collapse of the Cold War as an international system was thus to a large extent a result of the Third World's rejection of the need to see every issue from the increasingly arcane context of the clash between capitalism and socialism. The Gulf War of 1990-91 was the first conflict of the post-Cold War environment. In contrast to the decades of the Cold War when America was involved in a fearsome rivalry with the Soviet Union, the United States during the last years of the twentieth century had no serious rival within the international system. The conflict in Northern Ireland, which erupted in 1969 on the back of the emergence of a Catholic civil rights movement, had little if anything to do with the Cold War.
