Post–Cold War era

As the free world grows stronger, more united, more attractive to men on both sides of the Iron Curtain—and as the Soviet hopes for easy expansion are blocked—then there will have to come a time of change in the Soviet world. Nobody can say for sure when that is going to be, or exactly how it will come about, whether by evolution, or trouble in the satellite states, or by a change inside the Kremlin … I have a deep and abiding faith in the destiny of free men. With patience and courage, we shall someday move on into a new era (Harry Truman 1953)

The time may come, indeed we can be confident that it will come, when the nations now ruled by International Communism will have governments which … in fact serve their own nations… When that day comes, we can rejoice.(John Foster Dulles 1957)

The post–Cold War era is the period in world history from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present. The term was criticized for its ambiguity: "Even though it has been ten years since the Berlin Wall came down, wrote Paul Wolfowitz in 2000, we still have no better name for the period in which we live than the post-Cold War era." The name means that this new era “does not yet have a name.” it was suggested that Pax Americana would more reflect the reality of the era but this term would be "offending for many." The same dilemma expressed Condoleezza Rice: “That we do not know how to think about what follows the US-Soviet confrontation is clear from the continued references to the "post-Cold War period.'" "We knew better where we had been than where we were going.”

It has mostly been dominated by the rise of globalization (as well as seemingly paradoxically, nationalism) enabled by the commercialization of the Internet and the growth of the mobile phone system. The ideology of postmodernism and cultural relativism has according to some scholars replaced modernism and notions of absolute progress and ideology.

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Wikipedia