Some argued that the end of the Cold War reduced the threat, so liberating vast funds that could be spent more productively. Developments in the past decade have shown that optimism to be misplaced. Recent tragic events in the United States have shown the sense of security the end of Cold War instilled in many people to be false. With bloc discipline no longer masking local cleavages, the switch to a mono-polar world came with a sudden eruption of conflicts of unprecedented violence around the globe. And, with a nuclear holocaust no longer the prime threat, the positions of the major powers, vis-à-vis local conflagrations, have undergone radical changes. Former allies have fallen out among themselves. Ethnic conflicts, fuelled by clashing, alien interests have caused the fragmentation of whole states accompanied by widespread agony.