Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
pressure groups such as the Alliance for Conflict Transformation. The Caucasus
region, for example, where conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan and ethnic
civil unrest in Georgia marked the early 1990s, has been stabilized partly by concerted
governmental and non-governmental action stressing the incentives inherent to all
sides in pursuing peaceful relations. The US and Russian governments have given
promises of increased trade links and aid as a carrot while the general benefits of
increased tourism and trade within the region have been stressed by NGOs.
New world disorder?
Realist caution against optimism that the passing into history of the Cold War would
herald a new, uniquely pacific era of international relations could be considered borne
out by certain developments since 1990 which have not enhanced the military
security of the world’s states or people.
Is it really over? The persistence of Cold War disputes
In a 1998 article in a Russian academic journal, the prominent foreign policy analyst
Sergei Kortunov asked ‘Is the Cold War really over?’ (Kortunov 1998). Similarly
British academic Prins has posited: ‘Is the end of the Cold War, therefore, only
the end of Part I, just as Star Wars, the movie, promises?’ (Prins 2002: 46). That the
Cold War has not ended might initially appear an absurd suggestion when we cast
our minds back to the momentous changes that occurred at the end of the 1980s. The
images of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain being dismantled while the leaders of
the two Cold War superpowers publicly declared the conflict to be over portrayed
peace in as explicit terms as ever seen in history, but consider the evidence.
Korea
The Korean peninsular remains firmly frozen in the Cold War era, divided into two
ideologically defined states precisely as it was at the point of East–West stalemate
after the war in 1953. Communist North Korea’s relations with the West remain
practically non-existent while it maintains political links with its war ally, China.
US–Chinese relations
Relations between the USA, and most other western states, with their second major
Cold War foe have remained frosty in the years since 1990. Economic cooperation
has blossomed through mutual interest but diplomatic and military tensions
remain. No equivalent to the 1989 Malta Summit or 1990 Paris Treaty occurred in
Sino-American relations and a number of issues remain wholly unresolved. Most
prominently, the status of Taiwan remains a source of tension and the island remains
in a non-sovereign limbo, being claimed by China but still assured by the USA of
its independence. Tensions boiled over again in 2001, in a clash which had all the
40