| We probably owe this lull to the end of the cold war, and to a unipolar world order with a single superpower to impose its will. |
| The lone superpower can bribe, bully, or impose its will almost anywhere in the world, but when its back is turned, its potency wanes. |
| The only superpower in town seemed to be settling into what looked like a comfortably peaceful future. |
| We could wake up and find the next superpower defining itself in anti-American terms. |
| Unfortunately, the alternative to a single superpower is not a multilateral utopia but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age. |
| In the arithmetic of superpower rivalry during the Cold War people tended to be forgotten, the reality buried under rhetoric. |
