After War on Terror, US foreign policy will remain a work in progress

AFTER the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Washington was in a victorious mood. With its global adversary in ruins, the United States had won a 40-year-long Cold War.

The liberal international order it installed after the end of World War II was expected now to encompass the entire world. The United States would be advancing the Western democratic model while American-style capitalism (later to be known as "neoliberalism") was being embraced by former centralised economies including China and India.

That so-called unipolar moment, a term coined by the late neoconservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer, allowed the US to dictate the rules of the global game, extending the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Russia's borders, forcing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait (the first Gulf War), isolating "rogue states" like Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and dominating leading multilateral institutions.