By Abdikarim Buh

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a strange and unprecedented quiet settled over the world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, Eastern Europe was free, and Russia—though battered and bruised extended an open hand. Boris Yeltsin, desperate to pull his country out of the wreckage, told visiting Western economists, “We want to be a normal country. A normal democracy. A normal economy. Friendship with the United States.”

For a fleeting moment, it seemed possible. Washington had “won” the Cold War without a nuclear exchange, without a second Cuban Missile Crisis, without the collapse of the global system. The world stood at the threshold of what could have been the most hopeful era since the end of World War II.

But inside Washington’s concrete warrens—Langley, the Pentagon, the National Security Council—a very different calculation was already underway. The Cold War may have ended, but the Cold War mentality hadn’t. With the Soviet Union gone, America’s foreign-policy establishment saw not a partner to rebuild with, but a vacuum to dominate.

The new language circulating in classified briefs was revealing: unipolarity, primacy, full-spectrum dominance. Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and the rising neoconservative bloc embraced a doctrine that would shape the next three decades:

America must ensure no rival superpower ever emerges again—not Russia, not China, not anyone. The Cold War was over. The empire was not.

Dismembering the Defeated

In the euphoric blindness of the early 1990s, Washington’s strategists began to entertain ideas that would once have seemed unthinkably reckless. If the Soviet Union had collapsed along ethno-national lines, perhaps Russia itself could be broken apart too.

Think tanks quietly modelled scenarios in which Russia splintered into a European “rump state,” a Siberian republic, and a Far Eastern nation aligned with Japan or the United States. The talk in policy circles was chillingly casual: “decolonizing Russia,” “right-sizing Russia,” “managing Russia’s re-entry into the global system.”

Yeltsin begged for partnership.
Washington wanted advantage.

China? Nobody took it seriously in 1992. One U.S. official dismissed it as “a rice-growing backwater.” The focus remained on Russia and the temptation to encircle it before it could rise again.

The Black Sea: Choking the Bear

As strategists pored over maps, one feature jumped out: Russia’s life line is the Black Sea. Its warm-water ports—Novorossiysk and Sevastopol—were not mere naval bases; they were the lungs through which Russia breathed economically. A third of Russia’s energy and grain exports crossed those waters.

And critically, the Black Sea has only one exit to the world:
the Bosphorus Strait, controlled entirely by NATO member Turkey.

Washington understood the leverage this provided. Every move in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus—from NATO expansion to the courting of Ukraine and Georgia—tightened the noose around Russia’s only warm-water outlet.

The annexation of Crimea in 2014, the militarization of the Black Sea, and the current NATO–Russia standoff were not sudden eruptions. They were the predictable outcome of a 30-year geopolitical contest over Russia’s strategic throat.

The fuse was lit in the 1990s.
It is only exploding now.

The Empire That Refused to Retire

Despite its victory, America’s posture toward the world after 1991 remained steeped in the logic of the Cold War:
You are with us, or you are against us. Neutrality is unacceptable.

This echoes the ancient Athenian warning in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue. When the small island of Melos declares neutrality, Athens tells its leaders there is no such thing. Submit or be destroyed. Melos resisted. Athens annihilated it—and within a generation, Athens itself collapsed.

The American establishment learned all the wrong lessons from history. Victory bred hubris, not wisdom.

The Dangerous Stupidity of Nuclear Brinkmanship

The Cuban Missile Crisis remains the closest the world ever came to annihilation—and it was avoided only because a single Soviet officer, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to authorize a nuclear torpedo launch after U.S. ships harassed his submarine with practice depth charges.

Today, that kind of caution is gone.

The United States and Britain are now supplying long-range missiles used to hit targets deep inside Russia. European leaders applaud. Washington smiles. This is nuclear brinkmanship in its purest form—reckless, casual, and criminally naive.

There are more nuclear-armed countries today, more hair-trigger systems, more cyber vulnerabilities, more miscommunication. But fewer Arkhipovs.

A Century of Chaos—By Design

Across the Middle East and North Africa, the legacy of Washington’s post-Cold War hubris is written in rubble:

• Iraq, destroyed on false pretenses.
• Libya, turned into a slave market after NATO’s intervention.
• Syria, ripped apart by regime-change fantasies.
• Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon—casualties of geopolitical engineering.
• Gaza—an open wound of global hypocrisy.

The same pattern repeats: wars of choice, regimes toppled without plans, ethnic and sectarian fires ignited, millions displaced, food and energy crises deepened, and the Black Sea turned into a militarized flashpoint.

What should have been a global renaissance after 1991 became an age of engineered instability. Peace was possible. Hubris (excessive pride) prevailed.

The Tragic Lesson

The Soviet Union collapsed peacefully—no civil war, no nuclear meltdown, no Berlin-style occupation. Russia sought partnership, and the world genuinely had a chance to craft a cooperative, multipolar order.

Instead, Washington chose primacy. It expanded NATO to Russia’s borders, encircled China militarily, imposed a doctrine of regime change across the Global South, and reasserted the old imperial logic of permanent dominance.

Now the world lives with the consequences:
a fractured global order,
a new Cold War,
nuclear brinkmanship in Europe,
and crises stretching from Kyiv to Gaza, from the Sahel to the Bosphorus.

All traced back to one fateful choice:
the empire refused to retire.

And somewhere in the forgotten files of 1991 lies a final, tragic irony—
Yeltsin’s plea for “a normal world,”
a world the United States, triumphant and unchallenged, could have helped build.

Instead, Washington built the world we have now:
a world of disorder, perpetual conflict, and the slow unraveling of the very peace America once claimed to defend.

Abdikarim Haji Abdi Buh
Email: abdikarimbuh@yahoo.com