ABSTRACT
A handful of years straddling the seam between the eighties and nineties have brought profound changes to the East–West security equation. The pace of these changes, political and strategic, has been frenetic. The new order is now irreversible: an unintended consequence of the August 1991 attempted coup d’État in Moscow. Although the West was initially slow to react to the Soviet transformation process, the coup ensured more active consideration of accommodating political and military responses. An important aspect of this process is that from an ex-post perspective, turbulence appears to be orchestrating the coming-together of an ordered political, economic and strategic jigsaw. International cooperation has, and will continue to be, a key variable in this evolving framework.
