8. Juni 2021
The Charter of Paris for a New Europe was adopted by a summit meeting of most European governments in addition to those of Canada, the United States and the Soviet Union, in Paris from 19–21 November 1990.
In effect, the Paris Summit was the peace conference of the Cold War: Perestroika had ultimately put an end to the ideological and political division of the Iron Curtain. Pluralist democracy and market economy were together with international law and multilateralism seen as the victors, and as the common values and principles of national and international conduct that now ruled from Vancouver to Vienna to Vladivostok. Not even ten years after the Soviet Empire collapsed mainly by overstreching her power through the intervention in Afghanistan in late 1979. Twenty Years after I attended a conference in the capital of the victorious superpower Washington DC. I arrived on election day November 7, 1999.
The country was busy to sort out the election results for weeks. The threat assesments of Joint Chiefs of Staff did not expect any agression from abroad but focused on preventing a repetition of some kind of Oklahoma City bombing. But there were even some people from RAND as well from the Air Force who presented some awesome scenarios expecting attacks from abroad using lax controls to organise arial attacks using antrax or invading critical infrastracture by information warfare. The attack on the twin towers by passenger planes followed ten month later. But this was not in my mind when I used a afternoon out of Fort McNair to discover the Washington Monuments.
In the weeks before my journey I read Paul Kennedy’s book: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. I new about the new guys in Washington who were eager to implement the new ideas of offensive realism but did not expect they would take over power. But after the election results finally confirmed George W. Bush as the 43th President of the United States of America January 20, 2000 they started to implement their blueprint. The trauma started nine month later and hence the nation is entrapped in an outdated vision like the Soviet Union after the invasion of Afghanistan late 1979.