The demise of the soviet union was viewed in the West as a defeat of everything the Soviet Union had espoused. Francis Fukuyama, deputy director of the U.S. Department of State's policy planning staff, in 1989 viewed the events then unfolding as a victory of Western ideas over Soviet ideas. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” What was occurring, Fukuyama said, reflected “not … a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted,” but rather “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” The Western idea had prevailed over the Soviet.

U.S. President George H. W. Bush struck a similar note, saying that now the rule of law, Western style, could prevail in the world. “Out of these troubled times,” Bush told a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1990, “a new world order can emerge, a new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.”

Bush spoke against the backdrop of military confrontation in the Persian Gulf. The concerted United Nations action there, he said, heralded an era in which international conflicts could be managed, and in which aggression would no longer be feasible.