The collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the ramifications of it all
With the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties, the Cold War’s intermission began (although the orchestra seems, these days, to be taking its seats for the second movement) and the tension of nuclear war, and the need for proxies, ended as the principal actors left character and became friends. This dénouement accordingly made for an era of mostly global good feelings and one in which the aforementioned nuclear card was altogether shelved because of the lack of a reciprocal enemy against which to play it. However, if a nation these days that could possibly counter a nuclear threat via their own weapons, or that of an ally, were to emerge, the prospect of nuclear war would once more enter the realm of possibility. And since the early nineties, no nuclear opponent has truly come to play save North Korea and Iran, albeit as nations who have touted threats that can be described as, relative to past opponents’ boastings, no more than mere shenanigans.
The final question, therefore, is why have conflicts since the end of the Cold War been either quickly run or utterly endless. To begin with, in the case of the former of the scenarios, the example of the Gulf War makes for an excellent case study. In this conflict which lasted less than a year, a powerful Western World, having been primed for the end of times, was able to merely cruise through a feckless Iraqi force. Likewise, the Kosovo War was a short-lived conflict ending in the ‘bad guys’ being quickly dispatched (Major Military Operations). Essentially, when the target is clear and a nuclear stalemate is not in effect, it takes very little time for militaries prepared for the highest level of warfare to defeat their enemy. When the enemy is not clearly demarcated, however, nor defined by state borders, nor characterized by techniques that fit the definition of any particular genre of warfare, the fighting loses the directness that defined the examples of Iraq or Kosovo. Instead, the conflict becomes a ‘war on terror,’ i.e. a grasp at shadows, with groups, such as those who fight the US under the pretext of Islamic ideology, who can be anywhere or substantiate themselves in anyone. The war in Afghanistan, for example, was so long fought and generally fruitless (Nagorski) because the highly conventional allied armies, navies, and air forces sent to fight a midst the badlands and mountain ranges were inherently incompatible with their Afghan enemy that manifested itself in a force with no semblance of a reciprocal army, navy, or air force. These sort of unsuccessful wars will continue to increase in frequency and scale (until the world superpower relationship goes awry, that is) as now that the conventional channels of state-versus-state war have become both perfected and monopolized by nuclear powers that no tangible force dare threaten, the only methods which will yield any result are those which are small and intangible enough to weasel through the minute gaps of veritable defense leviathans. A good analogy would be how the rebel forces defeat the big, bad galactic empire in Star Wars. |
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