Finding Multilateral Solutions Global Cooperation in Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Ruud Lubbers Is Minister of State of the Netherlands. He Formerly Served As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 2001 to 2005 and As Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1982 to 1994 (PERSPECTIVES‪)‬

A multipolar world now exists, but it took 20 years after the end of the Cold War for the concept of multipolarity to develop. In 1989, then US President George H.W. Bush spoke about a promising "new global order" and US political economist Francis Fukuyama predicted the "End of History," both referring to the triumph of the capitalist market-economy system and US hegemony. Indeed, the era of two superpowers--a landscape composed of the Soviet Union and the United States, with a Third World of non-aligned countries--came to a close, and the fall of the Berlin Wall resulted in only one superpower, the United States. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]