Publisher's Synopsis
The United Nations Security Council has had in its history a single flash of true international relevance. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) signed up for Security Council relevance with the publication by Mikhail Gorbachev of Reality and Safeguards for a Secure World. That document heralded the USSR's preference that the United Nations fill the power vacuum left by its contracting empire rather than the United States, which was the other obvious choice then as now. Owing to this entirely unique, and relatively peaceful implosion of the USSR's global empire, the USSR consciously, if temporarily, reinvigorated the United Nations and sought to re-join the ranks of Roosevelt's "four policemen." A few years later for the United States, President George H.W. Bush, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, took the USSR up on its offer and announced that, "Out of these troubled times and a new world order can emerge and built upon a United Nations that performs as envisaged by its founders."
