Abstract
In the early 1990s, it became a mainstream, though controversial, opinion that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Eastern Bloc were signs of the “end of history”. It was supposed that the Western alliance had definitely won the world supremacy struggle and that no force could put such evidence in doubt. At the helm of the Western alliance, the US seemed to be a forever-established superpower that no nation on earth could challenge. This opinion was not only based on the military, economic and scientific might of the US but also on the diplomatic influence and the soft power it has demonstrated.
