ABSTRACT
The Kuwait crisis signaled an end to the Cold War and indeed to the entire bipolar post-World War IT order with dramatic live ammunition fireworks created by high-technology weapons, inaugurating a supposedly better, less antagonistic, and more peaceful "new" world order. In retrospect, the crisis was arguably intertwined with, or at least influenced by, two other major instances of turmoil: the breakup of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. One could say that all three crises converged into an international triple crisis that has lingered since 1989 and escalated in 1991. In that year, some months after the liberation of Kuwait, the other two parts of that triple crisis increased in intensity due to the cataclysmic effect of the 1991 Kuwait War, with the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in August and the radicalization and armed confrontation in the unexpected violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in July. All of these events happened within an unipolar international system with the United States as the one superpower, and they all occurred during the ongoing unification of Germany, Japan's process of identifying its new role as a world power, and the search for functioning new global structures and organizations.
