International Security Environment – I: Recent Developments and Characteristics of the Era

20 Oct, 2003    ·   1181

Maj Gen Dipankar Banerjee comments on the defining characteristics of the international security scenario


The early years of a new century is as good a time as any to reflect on the international security environment especially when monumental changes are underway. The scope of this outline is to take a broad overview of these major changes and identify the challenges to Indian policy. This is a view from India, shaped by its experiences and coloured by its perceptions and looking at ways to enhance national options.

Defining Developments of the Last Decade and a Half

Let us briefly recollect the defining developments that occurred in the last decade and a half beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union. The dissolution of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War and with it brought down the structures and alliances of that era which had shaped the international environment for the previous half century. It also had profound lessons in national security. Military power alone was unable to secure a country, when its basic structures were undermined by profound internal weaknesses. This demise was also a world transforming event, dramatically altering international relations including global security.

This was followed by the uncertain decade of the 1990’s - a period spent in search of a new world order. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, it began with the First Gulf Warâ€â€

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