The United States' humiliation in Vietnam coincided with major alterations to the bipolar world that had existed since 1945. While the Cold War certainly continued throughout the 1970s and, indeed, 1980s, there were changes to the fundamental structure of international relations that led to an enlarged and thereby more complex international system. By the early 1970s the manner in which the United States and the Soviet Union had jointly organized and run the world underwent novel and important shifts. President Nixon, for example, invoked the concept of a new world order. He identified five power centres: those, naturally, of the United States and the Soviet Union but with the addition of the European Community, the People's Republic of China, and Japan. There were, of course, large discrepancies in the relative political, military and economic power positions of all five such entities, but even to recognize these trends publicly within the world system is evidence of how the US government's thinking was evolving by the early 1970s.