// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did the Post–Cold War era say? It's post-poned its worries.

Post–Cold War era
Post–Cold War era
26 December 1991 – Ongoing
Cold War	Contemporary history
	Mapping America's War on Terrorism: an aggressive new strategy ("Pentagon's New Map")
Key events	Dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991); Maastricht Treaty (1992); Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001); September 11 attacks (2001); War on terror (2001–present); Financial crisis of 2007–2008; Russo-Ukrainian War (2014–present); COVID-19 Pandemic (2019–2023);

The post–Cold War era is a period of history that has been ongoing since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which began in 1988 and marked the end of the Cold War by 1991, thereby leaving the United States as the world's sole superpower. At the same time, Europe experienced the collapse of communism alongside the fall of the "Iron Curtain" between the American-aligned Western Bloc and the Soviet-aligned Eastern Bloc, which gradually embraced market economies. The establishment of the European Union (EU) in 1993 effectively reversed the continent's Cold War divide by absorbing most of Eastern Europe and integrating it with Western Europe over the course of three enlargements.

Relative to the Cold War, the period is characterized by stabilization and disarmament. Both Russia (the Soviet Union's legal successor state) and the United States significantly reduced their nuclear weapons stockpiles, and most Eastern Bloc countries became democratic and were integrated into the global economy. In the first two decades of the post–Cold War era, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) underwent three enlargements and France re-integrated into the NATO command, while Russia founded the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to replace the Warsaw Pact.

More recently, China has become a rising power and has likewise consolidated a greater role on the international stage while building a strategic partnership with Russia, with both countries working in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In response to these developments, the United States has begun a re-balancing of strategic forces out of Europe and into the Asia–Pacific.

Major events of the period are generally agreed to have included the September 11 attacks and ensuing war on terror, the militarization of the war on drugs, the Great Recession, the China–United States trade war, the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid warfare predominantly using the Internet, and growing concerns surrounding the AI boom, climate change, misinformation, information overload, and wealth inequality.

Major conflicts generally associated with the post–Cold War era include the United States invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, the Yugoslav Wars, the First and Second Congo Wars, the First and Second Chechen Wars, the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, the Mexican drug war, the Arab Spring, the Russo-Georgian War, the Syrian civil war, the North Korea crisis, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Gaza War and associated Middle Eastern crisis and Red Sea crisis, Operation Southern Spear, the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela, and the 2026 Iran war.

Background

Faced with the threat of growing German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and a world war, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union formed an alliance of necessity during World War II.^[1] After the Axis powers were defeated, the two most powerful states in the world became the Soviet Union and the United States. Both federations were called the world's superpowers.^[1] The underlying geopolitical and ideological differences between the recent allies led to the confrontation known as the Cold War, which lasted from about 1947 to 1991. It began with the second Red Scare and it ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. At the dawn of the new era, the historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote:

The new world of the post–Cold War era is likely to have few, if any, of these [Cold War] characteristics: that is an indication of how much things have already changed since the Cold War ended. We are at one of those rare points of 'punctuation' in history at which old patterns of stability have broken up and new ones have not yet emerged to take their place. Historians will certainly regard the years 1989–1991 as a turning point comparable in importance to the years 1789–1794, or 1917–1918, or 1945–1947; precisely what has 'turned,' however, is much less certain. We know that a series of geopolitical earthquakes have taken place, but it is not yet clear how these upheavals have rearranged the landscape that lies before us.^[2]

Subsequent events after the Cold War

During the Cold War, much of the policy and the infrastructure of the Western world and the Eastern Bloc had revolved around the capitalist and communist ideologies, respectively, and the possibility of a nuclear warfare. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union caused profound changes in nearly every society in the world. It enabled renewed attention to be paid to matters that were ignored during the Cold War and has paved the way for greater international cooperation, international organizations,^[3] and nationalist movements.^[4] The European Union expanded and further integrated, and power shifted from the G7 to the larger G20 economies.

The outcome symbolized a victory of democracy and capitalism which became a manner of collective self-validation for countries hoping to gain international respect. With democracy being seen as an important value, more countries began adopting that value.^[4] Communism ended also in Mongolia, Congo, Albania, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Angola. As of 2023, only five countries in the world are still ruled as communist states: China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.

United States foreign policy changes

The United States, having become the only global superpower, used that ideological victory to reinforce its leadership position in the new world order, proclaiming that "the United States and its allies are on the right side of history."^[5] This new world order is referred to as "liberal hegemony" in international relations theory. Using the peace dividend, the United States Armed Forces were able to cut much of its expenditure, but the level rose again to comparable heights after the September 11 attacks and the initiation of the war on terror in 2001.^[6] Accompanying NATO expansion, Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems were installed in Eastern Europe.^[7] However, from a relatively-weak developing country, China appeared as a fledgling emerging superpower that would challenge the U.S. and liberal democracy, creating new potential for worldwide conflict.^[7] In response to the rise of China, the U.S. has strategically "rebalanced" to the Asia-Pacific region, but also began to retreat from international commitments in favor of its own interests.^[8]

Starting from the 2020s onward, the perceived threat of global terrorism in the post-9/11 era has expanded beyond Middle Eastern jihadist groups, culminating in the United States and Canada designating several drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations as terrorist organizations in the context of narcoterrorism and the war on drugs.^[9]

The 2020s also found the Monroe Doctrine once again playing a central role in US foreign policy. The 200 year old doctrine has had different effects depending on the era in which it was employed but its central theme has stayed the same: to maintain US hegemony in trade routes, trade deals, security, and access in the Western Hemisphere.^[10]

Government, economic, and military institutions

The end of the Cold War also coincided with the end of apartheid in South Africa. Declining Cold War tensions in the later years of the 1980s meant that the apartheid regime was no longer supported by the West because of its anticommunism, but it was now condemned with an embargo. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and the regime began steps to end apartheid. This culminated in the first democratic elections in 1994, which resulted in Mandela being elected as President of South Africa.

Socialist and communist parties around the world saw drops in membership after the Berlin Wall fell, and the public felt that free-market ideology had won.^[11] Libertarian, neoliberal,^[12] nationalist^[12] and Islamist^[12] parties, on the other hand, benefited from the fall of the Soviet Union. As capitalism had "won," as people saw it, socialism and communism in general declined in popularity. Social democrats in Scandinavia privatized many of their institutions in the 1990s, and a political debate on modern economics was reopened.^[13] Scandinavian nations are often now seen as social democrat (see Nordic model). It has been posited by some scholars that the end of communism as a global force in the post–Cold War era allowed neoliberal capitalism to become the dominant global system, which has resulted in rising economic inequality.^[14]^[15]^[16]^[17]

The People's Republic of China, which had started to move towards capitalism in the late 1970s and faced public anger after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in Beijing, moved even more quickly towards free-market economics in the 1990s, framing this mixed economy as "socialism with Chinese characteristics". McDonald's and Pizza Hut both entered the country in the second half of 1990, the first American chains in China (aside from Kentucky Fried Chicken, which had entered in 1987). Stock markets were established in Shenzhen and Shanghai in late 1990 as well. Restrictions on car ownership were loosened in the early 1990s and caused the bicycle to decline as a form of transport by 2000. The move to capitalism has increased the economic prosperity of China, but many people still live in poor conditions and work for companies for very low wages and in dangerous and poor conditions.^[18]

Many other Third World countries had seen involvement from the United States and/or the Soviet Union, but solved their political conflicts because of the removal of the ideological interests of those superpowers.^[19] As a result of the apparent victory of democracy and capitalism in the Cold War, many more countries adapted these systems, which also allowed them access to the benefits of global trade, as economic power became more prominent than military power in the international arena.^[19] However, as the United States maintained global power, its role in many regime changes during the Cold War went mostly officially unacknowledged, even when some, such as El Salvador, Argentina and Indonesia, resulted in extensive human rights violations.^[20]^[21]^[22]

Technology

The end of the Cold War allowed many technologies that had been off limits to the public to be declassified. The most important of these is the Internet, which was created as ARPANET as a system to keep in touch after an impending nuclear war. The last restrictions on commercial enterprise online were lifted in 1995.^[23] The commercialization of the Internet and the growth of the mobile phone system increased globalization (as well as nationalism and populism in reaction).

In the years since then, the Internet's population and usefulness have grown immensely. Only about 20 million people (less than 0.5 percent of the world's population at the time) were online in 1995, mostly in the United States and several other Western countries. By the mid-2010s, more than a third of the world's population was online.^[24]

Further research continued into other Cold War technologies with the declassification of the Internet. While Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative proved untenable in its original form, the system lives on in a redesigned state as the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Countermeasures such as BMDS continue to be explored and improved upon post–Cold War, but are often criticized for being unable to effectively stop a full nuclear attack. Despite advances in their efficacy, anti-ballistic missiles are often viewed as an additional piece to modern day diplomacy where concepts such as mutual assured destruction and treaties such as that between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev following their Reykjavík Summit.^[25]

Alongside continued research defensive countermeasures there has been a proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Many nations have acquired technology required to produce nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. India tested its first nuclear weapon with Operation Smiling Buddha in 1974. It was followed by Pakistan's nuclear program acquiring centrifuges capable of enriching uranium in the 80's and in 1998 was able to conduct several underground tests. Today the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China all possess nuclear weapons and have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty^[26] in an attempt to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are also in possession of nuclear technology but have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.^{[citation needed]}

The Cold War brought with it increased research into radio technology as well as nuclear weapons. The success of Sputnik 1 lead to an increase funding for radio telescopes such as Jodrell Bank Observatory for use in tracking Sputnik and possible nuclear launches by the Soviet Union.^[27] Jodrell Bank and other observatories like it have since been used to track space probes as well as investigate quasars, pulsars, and meteoroids. Satellites such as the Vela that were originally launched to detect nuclear detonation following the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty have been used since then to discover and further investigate gamma-ray bursts.^{[citation needed]}

A new space race began in the 2020s, largely between the United States' Artemis Program and China's Lunar Exploration Program.^[28]

Conflicts and geopolitical shifts

The first quarter of the 21st century has witnessed a profound transformation in global power dynamics, transitioning away from the post-Cold War unipolarity dominated by the United States toward a fragmented, multipolar geopolitical landscape. The early decades were characterized by highly costly, asymmetrical campaigns like the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, which exposed the structural limits of Western military interventionism and sparked an era of relative American strategic retrenchment. This shift opened a vacuum eagerly filled by regional and revisionist powers, as seen in the multi-sided proxy arena of the Syrian Civil War, where international interventions and localized internal struggles completely realigned regional balances of power.^[29]

Crucially, the final years of this initial quarter shattered lingering post-Cold War security architectures entirely. The escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War from the 2014 annexation of Crimea into a full-scale conventional invasion by Russia in 2022 marked the definitive return of high-intensity state-on-state territorial warfare to Europe, forcing a strategic revitalization of NATO's deterrent positioning and driving massive economic fragmentation.^[30] Concurrently, entrenched systemic instability across sub-Saharan Africa—manifested in brutal internal power struggles like the Sudanese Civil War, which displaced millions and triggered catastrophic humanitarian crises—and the explosive regional spillover of the Israel–Hamas war in the Middle East collectively underscore a new paradigm where localized conflicts rapidly become major tests of global diplomatic resilience, international law, and resource security.^[31]

The rapid convergence of the 21st-century artificial intelligence boom with consumer hardware has systematically democratized lethality, introducing unprecedented threats to human life across global battlefields. Historically, electronic warfare (EW) served as a primary defense by jamming the radio control signals between a human pilot and a drone. However, the integration of lightweight, commercial machine learning chips has effectively rendered traditional jamming obsolete. In modern high-intensity theaters, military and non-state entities alike are deploying mass-produced, off-the-shelf First-Person View (FPV) hobby quadcopters equipped with modular AI edge-computing packages. These systems use basic computer vision algorithms to execute "last-mile" autonomous targeting; if a drone loses its communications link, the onboard AI dynamically sifts through visual feeds, independently locks onto human silhouettes or vehicles, and guides the munition to its target without human intervention.

In the Russo-Ukrainian War, the integration of AI-driven edge-computing with commercial drone platforms has transformed the front line into a highly lethal, ten-mile-wide "kill zone", where military analysts estimate that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now responsible for 70% to 80% of all battlefield casualties. Historically, electronic jamming could sever the radio connection between a human operator and a drone, causing the aircraft to crash safely. Modern FPV (First-Person View) drones use onboard AI microprocessors (such as commercial Nvidia modules) that require no satellite or radio tether. If jammed, the autonomous system takes complete control during the final flight phase. In the last 500 meters of a strike, onboard machine learning algorithms analyze live optical feeds to identify and lock onto specific targets. The AI can distinguish human silhouettes, moving vehicles, and even specify vulnerable entry points on armored tanks. This terminal autonomy makes rookie drone pilots up to four times more effective, drastically accelerating the military "kill chain". Because these weaponized quadcopters are assembled from cheap, off-the-shelf consumer parts, they are mass-produced by the millions.^[32] Ukrainian drone units neutralized over 350,000 Russian drones in the first three quarters of 2026 alone, while automated drone forces routinely claim over 30,000 casualties per month on the front lines. The lack of human oversight in fully autonomous deployments has increasingly placed civilians in harm's way. Striking deep into cities like Kyiv, Odessa, and Zaporizhzhia, self-targeting AI drones have misidentified or collided with civilian infrastructure—including business centers, energy grids, and medical centers—resulting in widespread non-combatant fatalities far from the active lines of contact.^[33]

Major Conflicts of the 21st Century
Conflict	Years	Primary Location	Main Factions / Belligerents	Impact & Key Developments	Estimated Casualties	Main Article
War in Afghanistan	2001–2021	Afghanistan	United States, NATO (ISAF), Islamic Republic of Afghanistan vs. Taliban, Al-Qaeda	Triggered by the Sept. 11 attacks; resulted in a 20-year asymmetric conflict. Concluded with the withdrawal of Western forces and the Taliban reclaiming governance in 2021.	~176,000+	War in Afghanistan (2001–2021)
Iraq War	2003–2011	Iraq	United States, United Kingdom, coalition forces vs. Ba'athist Iraq (2003), Iraqi insurgent factions	Began with a US-led invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein. Transitioned into a prolonged insurgency and sectarian conflict until the formal US withdrawal.	150,000–500,000+	Iraq War
Mexican drug war	2006–present	Mexico	Mexican Federal Forces vs. Various rival drug cartels	An ongoing low-intensity conflict initiated by the militarization of the anti-drug campaign, leading to massive civilian casualties and cartel fractionalization.	350,000–450,000+	Mexican drug war
Boko Haram insurgency	2009–present	Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Chad	Nigeria and multinational coalition vs. Boko Haram, ISWAP	Islamist insurgency that displaced millions in the Lake Chad basin, marked by extreme violence against civilians and mass abductions.	~350,000	Boko Haram insurgency
Syrian civil war	2011–present	Syria	Assad Government (allied with Russia/Iran) vs. Syrian opposition factions, Kurdish forces, ISIL	Escalated from Arab Spring protests into a devastating multi-sided proxy war, generating one of the largest refugee crises of the modern era.	500,000–610,000+	Syrian civil war
Libyan Civil Wars	2011–present	Libya	National Transitional Council, rival government coalitions (GNA, LNA) vs. Gaddafi regime (2011), various localized militias	Began with a NATO-backed uprising that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, leading to persistent political fragmentation, dual governments, and localized clashes.	25,000–40,000	Libyan crisis (2011–present)
Yemeni Civil War	2014–present	Yemen, Saudi Arabia	Hadi/Rashad government (backed by Saudi coalition) vs. Houthi movement, Iran-backed factions	Sparked a severe humanitarian crisis. Evolved into maritime escalations, including localized drone strikes, shipping blockades, and international naval responses.	~377,000	Yemeni civil war (2014–present)
War in Iraq (2013–2017)	2014–2017	Iraq	Iraqi Armed Forces, Peshmerga, CJTF-OIR (US-led) vs. ISIL (ISIS)	A major military campaign to recapture extensive territorial gains made by the Islamic State, ending with the territorial defeat of the caliphate in Iraq.	155,000+	War in Iraq (2013–2017)
Russo-Ukrainian War	2014–present	Ukraine	Ukraine vs. Russian Federation	Began with the 2014 annexation of Crimea and escalated into a full-scale conventional invasion by Russia in 2022, marking Europe's largest land conflict since WWII.	~500,000+	Russo-Ukrainian War
Tigray War	2020–2022	Ethiopia (Tigray Region)	Ethiopian National Defense Force, Eritrean Defence Forces vs. Tigray Defense Forces	A high-intensity civil conflict involving severe blockades and widespread displacement, formally concluding with the Pretoria peace agreement.	100,000–600,000	Tigray War
Sudanese Civil War	2023–present	Sudan	Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) vs. Rapid Support Forces (RSF)	A destructive power struggle between the national military and a powerful paramilitary group, destroying urban centers and triggering catastrophic famine risks.	62,000–150,000+	Sudan conflict (2023–present)
Israel–Hamas war	2023–present	Gaza Strip, Israel, Lebanon	Israel Defense Forces vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Axis of Resistance	Sparked by the October 7 attacks, evolving into intensive urban combat in Gaza, major regional spillover across Lebanon, and direct proxy escalations.	~65,000+	Israel–Hamas war

Global pandemic (2020-2023)

Although scientists and researchers had warned of a global pandemic for years, world governments were still largely unprepared for the emergence of the Covid-19 disease as it spread in a matter of weeks in early 2020. Scientists estimate that there was a 70% chance that Covid-19 would have gone extinct on its own, before reaching what's called a endemic virus (reaching the point of being embedded in the host population).^[34] As the nature of the virus became clear, countries were forced to shut down travel, businesses, and the way of life for most of the world, to a degree unprecedented in modern history. Lost global economic output measures up to $22 trillion during this time (most of 2020 through 2022). Governments and health agencies were forced to develop response plans in record time. Efforts in the United States like Operation Warp Speed sought to develop a vaccine, which was successfully released in late 2020.^[35] In the end, the pandemic became the fifth-deadliest pandemic in history and still threatens health outcomes of individuals through long covid.

References

1 2 "Cold War Revision". Johndclare.net. 21 November 2008. Archived from the original on 11 September 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
↑ "The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future," Diplomatic History, 16/2, (1992): p 235.
↑ Mohapatra, J. K., & Panigrahi, P. K. (1998). "The Post–Cold War Period: New Configurations". India Quarterly. 54 (1–2): 129–140. doi:10.1177/097492849805400111. S2CID 157453375.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
1 2 Goldman, Kjell, Hannerz, Ulf, Westin, Charles (2000). Nationalism and Internationalism in the post–Cold War Era. Psychology Press. ISBN 9780415238908. Archived from the original on 15 January 2023. Retrieved 11 March 2021 – via SAGE Pub.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑ Condoleezza Rice, "Promoting the National Interest," Foreign Affairs, 79/1, (January/February 2000): p 45.
↑ Shah, Anup (30 June 2013). "World Military Spending — Global Issues". Globalissues.org. Archived from the original on 12 May 2019. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
1 2 GADDIS, JOHN LEWIS (April 1992). "The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future". Diplomatic History. 16 (2): 234–246. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1992.tb00499.x. ISSN 0145-2096.
↑ Weisbrode, K. "America's Strategic Surrender," Internationale Politik, Summer 2006.
↑ Rubio, Marco (20 February 2025). "Terrorist Designations of International Cartels".
↑ "The good, the bad, and the ugly of the Monroe Doctrine". Engelsberg ideas (in Swedish). Retrieved 11 September 2026.
↑ Archivist (14 January 2013). "Left and radical :: SWP". Socialist Party. Archived from the original on 1 October 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
1 2 3 "The Lost American – Post–Cold War | FRONTLINE". PBS. Archived from the original on 26 September 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
↑ Francis Sejersted (2011). The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press. p. 356. ISBN 978-0-691-14774-1.
↑ Ghodsee, Kristen (2018). Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. Vintage Books. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-1568588902. Without the looming threat of a rival superpower, the last thirty years of global neoliberalism have witnessed a rapid shriveling of social programs that protect citizens from cyclical instability and financial crises and reduce the vast inequality of economic outcomes between those at the top and bottom of the income distribution.
↑ Greene, Julie (April 2020). "Bookends to a Gentler Capitalism: Complicating the Notion of First and Second Gilded Ages". The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 19 (2). Cambridge University Press: 197–205. doi:10.1017/S1537781419000628.
↑ Bartel, Fritz (2022). The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. pp. 5–6. ISBN 9780674976788.
↑ Gerstle, Gary (2022). The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 149. ISBN 978-0197519646. The collapse of communism, then, opened the entire world to capitalist penetration, shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.
↑ "Apple's Chinese suppliers still exploiting workers, says report". CBS News. 27 February 2013. Archived from the original on 26 September 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
1 2 Ruland, Jurgen (22 July 2016). U.S. Foreign Policy Toward the Third World: A Post–Cold War Assessment. doi:10.4324/9781315497495. ISBN 9781315497495.
↑ Bonner, Raymond. "Time for a US Apology to El Salvador". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Archived from the original on 16 January 2020. Retrieved 15 November 2018.
↑ Bevins, Vincent (2020). The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. PublicAffairs. p. 157. ISBN 978-1-5417-4240-6. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered.
↑ Blakeley, Ruth (2009). State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: The North in the South. Routledge. p. 22, 23, 85-96. ISBN 978-0-415-68617-4.
↑ Cameron Chapman. "The History of the Internet in a Nutshell". Sixrevisions.com. Archived from the original on 25 September 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
↑ "One third of the world's population is online : 45% of Internet users below the age of 25" (PDF). Itu.int. Archived (PDF) from the original on 25 September 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
↑ Pugacewicz, Tomasz (23 June 2021). "Missile Defense Roles in the Post–Cold War U.S. Strategy". Politeja. 14 (5 (50)): 263–293. doi:10.12797/politeja.14.2017.50.12. ISSN 2391-6737. S2CID 211313948.
↑ "UNTC". United Nations. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
↑ Spinardi, Graham (August 2006). "Science, Technology, and the Cold War: The Military Uses of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope". Cold War History. 6 (3): 279–300. doi:10.1080/14682740600795428. ISSN 1468-2745. S2CID 154984982.
↑ "The New Space Race | The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs". www.belfercenter.org. 13 May 2026. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
↑ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (15 March 2026). "Syria in a New Era". Retrieved 25 September 2026.
↑ CNN Politics (21 September 2026). "Beyond Ukraine: Why Europe is preparing for a wider conflict". Retrieved 25 September 2026. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
↑ SpecialEurasia (28 December 2025). "Middle East Geopolitical Risk and Regional Stability". Retrieved 25 September 2026.
↑ "Russian losses in the war with Ukraine. Mediazona count, updated". Mediazona. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
↑ "Attacks against retail, food, and logistics companies surge amid high civilian casualties, UN human rights monitors say | UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine". ukraine.ohchr.org. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
↑ "Novel Coronavirus Circulated Undetected Months before First COVID-19 Cases in Wuhan, China". UC San Diego Health. Retrieved 26 September 2026.
↑ "Pfizer and BioNTech Celebrate Historic First Authorization in the U.S. of Vaccine to Prevent COVID-19 | Pfizer". www.pfizer.com. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

v t e Eastern world and culture
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Contemporary integration	APEC Arab Customs Union Arab League ASEAN Asia and the Pacific Group Asia Cooperation Dialogue Asia Council BIMSTEC CAREC CAU CSTO CPTPP CEPEA EAC Eastern Bloc Easternization EAEU EAEU Customs Union ECO GCC OTS RCEP SAARC SCO SEATO TCS

v t e Post–Cold War conflicts in Europe
Eastern Europe	Nagorno-Karabakh conflict (1988–2024) First War 2016 conflict Second War Gagauzia conflict (1989–1995) Transnistria conflict (1990–present) Transnistria War (1990–1992) Georgian Civil War (1991–1993) Ossetian conflict (1991–present) South Ossetia War (1991–92) Abkhazia conflict (1992–present) War in Abkhazia (1992–1993) War in Abkhazia (1998) East Prigorodny conflict (1992) Russian constitutional crisis (1993) Chechen conflict (1991–2017) First Chechen War (1994–1996) War in Dagestan (1999) Second Chechen War (1999–2009) Pankisi Gorge crisis Tuzla Island conflict (2003) Russo-Georgian War (2008) Maidan Uprising (2013) Revolution of Dignity (2014) Russo-Ukrainian War (2014–present) Russian annexation of Crimea (2014) War in Donbas 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Wagner Group rebellion (2023) Armenia–Azerbaijan border crisis (2021–present)
Southern Europe	Slovenian War of Independence (1991) Croatian War of Independence (1991–1995) Bosnian War (1992–1995) Croat–Bosniak War (1992–1994) Albanian Civil War (1997) Kosovo War (1998–1999) Insurgency in the Preševo Valley (1999–2001) Insurgency in Macedonia (2001)
Western Europe	Loyalist Feud Dissident Irish republican campaign
Related topics	Cold War European re-armament in the 2020s List of Post-Soviet conflicts List of ongoing armed conflicts List of proxy wars List of frozen conflicts War on terror

v t e Post–Cold War conflicts in the Americas
List of conflicts in North America List of conflicts in Central America List of conflicts in South America
North America	United States invasion of Panama (1989–1990) Chiapas conflict (1994–2014) Mexican drug war (2006–present) US military buildup in the Caribbean (2025–present)
Central America	Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) United States invasion of Panama (1989–1990)
South America	Mapuche conflict (1997–present) Colombian conflict (1964–present) Internal conflict in Peru (1980–present) Insurgency in Paraguay (2005–present) Crisis in Venezuela (2010–present)
Related topics	Cold War War on terror

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