e dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 is usually considered the event marking the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-Cold War period. e end of the Soviet Union was not simply the end of the Soviet Union—one of the world’s two superpowers at the time. It also meant the end of the bipolar international system established after World War II, leaving the United States as the sole superpower of the international system and prompting a group of policymakers and scholars alike to trying to (re) define and conceptualize this ‘new world order’— or ‘new world “disorder”’—as others have preferred to name the international system. When the Soviet Union collapsed, most Western Sovietologists and theorists of realism were accused of not being able to predict this event with colossal implications. The correct answer is Choice E.