Foreign and Defence Policy

Abstract

The late 1980s was a period of unprecedented change in the post-war world. British foreign and defence policy is now having to be made and implemented in a rapidly changing world. A decade that started out with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House, and the development of a second cold war, ended with earnest discussion in Washington of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’ (1989), an article arguing that the cold war was over, and that the West had ‘won’. There was no longer any alternative to Western values; the ‘end’ of the great ideological conflicts which had shaped history were nigh. Yet only the previous year the most popular book in Washington had been Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988), interpreted as prophesying not the end of history on US terms but rather the decline of US power.