Title: The Lost American - Post-Cold War | FRONTLINE | PBS
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4. the shift towards market-based democracies. Each of these presents new opportunities, as well as posing new constraints on international relief and development agencies. The End of the Cold War
By far, the end of the Cold War is the dominate event of the decade and, indeed, the later half of the twentieth century. From a geo-political stand point, the most significant factor to emerge is the preeminence of the West collectively as the dominant world power. In military terms, the West is the coalition forged by the United States to confront Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. That war demonstrated the superiority of Western military technology and ended America's self-imposed, post-Vietnam restraint from an active and interventionist foreign policy. There was another event related to the Gulf War that opened a new chapter in relief operations: the humanitarian intervention to protect the Kurds in northern Iraq. It was militarily only a footnote to the end of the Gulf War but Operation Provide Comfort, as the intervention was dubbed, has major implications for post-Cold War humanitarian crises.