The Post Cold War World Turbulence and Change in World Politics Since the Fall

This book by a leading scholar of international relations examines the origins of the new world disorder– the resurgence of Russia, the rise of populism in the West, deep tensions in the Atlantic alliance, and the new strategic partnership between China and Russia– and asks why so many assumptions about how the world might look after the Cold War – liberal, democratic and increasingly global– have proven to be so wrong. To explain this, Michael Cox goes back to the moment of disintegration and examines what the Cold War was about, why the Cold War ended, why the experts failed to predict it, and how different writers and policy-makers (and not just western ones) have viewed the tumultuous period between 1989 when the liberal order seemed on top of the world through to the current period when confidence in the western project seems to have disappeared almost completely.

Part One: Unexpected Victory 1. From the Truman Doctrine to the Second Superpower Detente: The Rise and Fall of the Cold War 2. Why did we get the end of the Cold War wrong? 3. His Finest Hour?' George Bush and the Diplomacy of German Unification 4. Another Transatlantic Split? American and European Narratives and the End of the Cold War Part Two: After the Fall 5. Learning from history? From Soviet collapse to the ‘new’ Cold War 6. Not just ‘convenient’: China and Russia’s new strategic partnership in the age of geopolitics Part Three: Crisis in the West? 7. Power shifts, Economic Change and the Decline of the West 8. Beyond the West: Terrors in Transatlantia 9. Still the American Empire 10. Europe – Still between the Superpowers 11. The Rise of Populism and the Crisis of Globalization: Brexit, Trump and Beyond

Michael Cox is Director of LSE IDEAS and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, United Kingdom.