Over the past century, Great Power transitions have led to the spread of autocracy in two distinct ways. First, the sudden rise of autocratic Great Powers led to waves of autocracy driven by conquest but also by self-interest and even admiration, as in the fascist wave of the 1930s or the post-1945 communist wave. Second, the sudden rise of democratic hegemons led to waves of democratization, but these waves inevitably overextended and collapsed, leading to failed consolidation and rollback. While these two categories - rollback from democratic overstretch, and hegemonic authoritarian cascades - both look like autocratic diffusion, they stem from very different causes. This chapter examines the relationship between Great Power transitions and regime diffusion. A key question is whether modern democratic decline is a post-1991 correction – that is, the delayed but inevitable overstretch of the post-Soviet wave – or the beginning of a distinct new wave of autocracy.

This chapter recounts Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision for the post-Cold War world order, focusing in particular on the disarmament negotiations and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The chapter argues that Gorbachev’s foreign policy was underpinned by the ambition to recapture moral leadership in the world (which, for the Soviet leader, was closely linked to the legitimacy of the Soviet project, and indeed to his own political legitimacy). This ambition was clearly discernible in his approach to disarmament. The vision of a nuclear-free world (as presented by the General Secretary in 1986) was instrumental to the broader agenda of global leadership, which, Gorbachev felt, the Soviet Union had long abandoned. The same agenda animated his approach to the war in Afghanistan: Leaving Afghanistan was important for moral reasons, as a practical manifestation of the new spirit Gorbachev purported to represent. The exit was delayed, however, when the Soviet leader realized that quitting the war carried its own implications for Moscow’s global standing, and, in particular, undercut Soviet credibility in the third world. By recentering the Cold War endgame on Gorbachev’s global ambitions, the paper seeks to contextualize the General Secretary’s approach to foreign policy within the broader tradition of Soviet political leadership during and after the Cold War.

The Soviet Union’s official ideology, Marxism-Leninism, was universal, aspiring to explain all humanity’s past and future. It claimed to be a science, applicable to social relations, economics, and international politics. Culture, religion, and traditional social structures, Marxism-Leninism taught, would be swept away by economic and social change. This was true in Soviet domestic politics, where "feudal" practices such as religion and patriarchy were supposed to be replaced by the Party and the State. It was also true, experts in Marxism-Leninism taught, in international politics, where class not culture would determine the future. In the 1970s, however, Soviet experts, analysts, and officials began to question the supposed irrelevance of culture, religion, and tradition. In foreign policy, culture seemed of enduring relevance in explaining how countries in Asia and Africa interacted with the Soviet Union. In domestic politics, "traditional structures" in regions like Central Asia and the Caucasus seemed to persist generations after Soviet power had been established. This paper traces Soviet and later Russian belief in the importance of cultural, ethnic, national, and civilizational factors in politics from the 1970s to the present via several influential intellectuals who drove the shift. It connects the rising Soviet belief in the importance of clashing civilizations to declining faith in Russia in universalistic politics in general. In the West, the Cold War’s end was associated with Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis. In Russia, the Cold War’s demise corresponded with a rejection of Marxist-Leninist universalism and a new emphasis on cultural and civilizational difference.

What are the essential features of the post-Cold War world order and how is it likely to evolve? In this chapter, Nuno P. Monteiro analyzes the magnitude of the power shifts that took place around the 1989/91 watershed – between the United States and both Russia and China – and examines the ways in which the post-Cold War order relates to earlier times. Much has changed on the surface, above all the emergence of a preponderant global power, the United States. At the same time, much has also remained the same: the centrality of states, their goals and strategies, the role of material capabilities and ideology in furthering state goals, the effects of the nuclear revolution, and so on. Combining these continuities and changes, Monteiro distills the central features of world order in the post-Cold War era. He then concludes by looking at current transformations in world politics – such as the emergence of a viable alternative to the Western way of life backed by the massive capabilities of the Chinese state – and highlighting the major issues on which the future of world order hangs.

The scholarly debate on the causes of the end of the Cold War has placed significant emphasis on the role of communist economic stagnation in bringing about the collapse of communism. This chapter brings a new material factor – communist sovereign debt – to the forefront, and in so doing, it offers a redefinition of the materialist explanation for the end of the Cold War. The global financial history of the end of the Cold War has four important implications. First, it makes the timing of the end of the Cold War far less contingent upon Gorbachev’s rise than previously thought. Second, it allows us to refine the causal connection between Soviet relative decline and the peaceful nature of the end of the Cold War. Third, global financial history transforms our understanding of Western leverage over the events that comprise the end of the Cold War. And fourth, the history of sovereign debt in the Eastern Bloc de-exceptionalizes the revolutions of 1989 in world history and places them within the context of broader global currents that continue to this day.

Using previously untapped Chinese sources, this chapter builds on recent scholarship to provide additional insight into Deng Xiaoping’s handling of relations with the United States in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown of June 1989. Confronted with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as well as with Western sanctions, Deng had the tough job of balancing between conservatives and reformers in China’s leadership circle. Unlike the conservatives, who were ascending, and who blamed the United States for all of China’s troubles and would not have hesitated to break relations with Washington, Deng wanted to “keep the US door open.” But at the same time, Deng did not want to show any softness in dealing with Washington. Deng’s foreign policy directive, “avoiding the limelight, and getting some things done,” saved communist rule in China. After three years of dedicated diplomacy, China gradually broke Western sanctions and regained international acceptance, including a White House welcome for the Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen. Had the Bush administration been tougher on China after the Tiananmen crackdown, it might have delayed China’s economic rise, but it wouldn’t have brought down the Chinese communist regime.

What will be the contours of the “post-post-Cold War” world? This chapter takes up that question by examining the defining international and domestic characteristics of this new age and assessing their similarities with previous eras. We begin by identifying three defining attributes of the Cold War: ideological clash, limited economic exchange, and nuclear arms racing between the American and Soviet-led blocs. Next, we explore the central feature of the post-Cold War era - namely, American primacy. We then examine the trends that have eroded primacy's material underpinnings and produced new domestic and International conditions — global power shifts, technological change, and sociopolitical fragmentation -- then project forward how those trends are likely to evolve over the next ten to fifteen years. Finally, we examine the extent to which those trends are distinct from, or continuous with, the conditions facing the United States during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, and find that some important continuities remain even as meaningful discontinuities will disrupt existing patterns of international order. The chapter concludes by arguing that the post-post-Cold War world requires a new strategic approach for the United States — one guided by a principle of openness, rather than Cold War-style containment or post-Cold War-style liberal universalism.

The collapse of the Soviet Union radically changed the external and domestic environment for a new Russian state. Existing political science theories predict that radical changes to the international system or to the domestic regime affect the content of nuclear strategy. This chapter uses Russian archival and oral history sources on nuclear decision-making from the 1980s and 1990s to demonstrate that such change did not take place in Russian nuclear strategy. Soviet strategic thought and institutional mechanisms for strategy formulation would prove sticky, producing continuity rather than change in this area. The Soviet tradition for deterring nuclear war by preparing to fight it has continued to shape Russian nuclear strategy throughout the entire post-Cold War era.

Throughout the mid-1980s, the Soviet-American rivalry in the Muslim world had remained a “zero-sum game.” Even after Mikhail Gorbachev embraced perestroika and Ronald Reagan toned down his Cold War rhetoric, the two superpowers continued to butt heads. Then between 1988 and 1991, the “end of history” seemed to arrive and George H. W. Bush trumpeted the emergence of a new world order based on cooperation, not confrontation, between capitalist America and communist Russia, even in volatile places like the Persian Gulf. By the early 1990s, however, American and Russian policymakers recognized that the Cold War was more likely to be followed by ethnic and religious conflict than by global peace and prosperity. In late 1991, Gorbachev lost his battle to reform the Soviet Union. Muslims in Chechnya and other non-Russian minorities sought independence. Elsewhere, the multiethnic regime in Yugoslavia disintegrated, with Christian Serbs slaughtering Bosnian Muslims; Islamists won elections in Algeria' and Islamic radicals toppled the pro-Soviet junta in Afghanistan. By January 1993, both Bush and Gorbachev were gone and all the hope for a new world order had been replaced by the fear that the post-Cold War Muslim world was becoming the epicenter of a “clash of civilizations.”

What Bernard Brodie said about nuclear weapons in 1946 continues to be true: The most important thing about nuclear weapons is that they exist and are terribly powerful. This was true in both the Cold War and the subsequent era. Although the situation has changed a great deal, there are striking continuities, especially in American attitudes and policies. Most obviously, the United States has consistently opposed nuclear proliferation, with only a very few exceptions for its closest friends. Second, the debate within the United States about the role of nuclear weapons has been altered only slightly by the end of the Cold War. The fundamental division between those who see nuclear weapons as having a revolutionary impact on world politics and those who do not continues. Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review makes arguments that are remarkably similar to those made under the Raegan administration. In parallel, the arguments made against Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) systems today are quite similar to those advanced during the Cold War, despite the radically changed conditions. This indicates that ways of thinking about nuclear weapons have become deeply engrained.

Now that more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that, while some borders have disappeared, new fronts have appeared as well. And, rather than a “new world order,” a familiar antagonism between Russia and the West is once again asserting itself. Among the central points of dispute is the question of whether the West offered Moscow assurances in 1989-90 in the form of a NATO non-expansion guarantee. Diverging interpretations of this crucial development continue to hinder international understanding and dialogue. In this chapter, Sarotte draws on elements of her historical research into archives in six countries to present evidence on what actually transpired, and to discuss the following questions: To what extent do current challenges for European security policy still have roots in the decisions and commitments of the powers involved in the process of German reunification thirty years ago? How did the Clinton administration come to support full Article 5 NATO enlargement rather than NATO’s Partnership for Peace? And what can we learn from those events to address the challenges of today?

The Cold War’s denouement not only saw profound political changes throughout Eurasia, but an unprecedented power shift resulting from the Soviet Union’s decline that ultimately ushered in the United States’ “unipolar era.” Nevertheless, the United States’ response to the late Cold War power shift remains underexplored. This chapter fills the gap by examining the processes by which the United States recognized the power shift underway and adapted its foreign policy. I make three arguments. First, American policymakers in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations acknowledged that Soviet decline rebounded to the United States’ geopolitical advantage. Second, American policymakers responded by exploiting Soviet problems, driven by recognition that Soviet decline allowed for American gains, yet worried that the window for gains would soon close. Third, this effort altered European security, as the United States undercut the Soviet Union as a challenger while fostering conditions that could allow it to dominate European security irrespective of whether Soviet problems continued. Put simply, the United States used the Soviet decline to reify American advantages in Europe, garnering oversight over a region that had long been the cockpit of geopolitical contestation. The result meant that unipolarity also translated into American near-hegemony in Europe.