The dissolution of the Soviet Union fifteen years ago took many in the United States by surprise. Whether or not the U.S. government ought to have been better prepared for this eventuality, U.S. decisionmakers had not done much thinking on how to deal with post-Soviet states before the actual disintegration occurred. In 1991, therefore, they were forced to start from scratch. The conceptual vacuum that followed was a protracted phenomenon. Not only had fifteen states appeared in place of a single one, this occurred against the backdrop of a changing global landscape. The search for a new global role for the United States had been launched, and the post-Soviet dimension of its foreign policy was merely one of many, and no longer the priority. […]
Memo #:
424
Series:
1
PDF:
PDF URL:
http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/ponars/pm_0424.pdf
