Now for the Post-Post-Cold War Era

What was the post-Cold War era—a time first and forever defined by what it was not? Was it even a fleeting Pax Americana, this “unipolar moment”? Or were such pronouncements merely hubris, the pride that inevitably comes before a fall? The temptation always has been to see this period as one shaped by ineluctable forces: a Hegelian end of history revealing liberal democracy as the only legitimate form of government, or the apoth-eosis of “geoeconomics,” when commerce supplanted military power and national sovereignty “devolved” to supranational institutions or super-localism or some hybrid of the two. The Big Thinking of the past generation has been one long parade of Big Ideas, none of which seemed to last more than a season or two.

But to be content with Lexus-and-olive-tree history is to lose a sense of the contingencies, the counterfactuals, and especially the influence of individuals and their decisions on the course of events. This past generation has been, when compared with the recorded past, a unipolar moment. “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power, nothing,” wrote Paul Kennedy, previously the prophet of the rise and fall of great powers, of U.S. preeminence in 2002. Yet now, at the transition from Obama to Donald Trump, it is apparent that this unprecedented disparity was not translated into anything of permanence. The unipolar moment did not become a Pax Americana. Far from it.

What happened?

The answer to that question must begin by recollecting what a surprise the collapse of the Soviet Union was, how rapid it was, and how it reflected internal rot much more than external pressures or influence. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the twilight struggle with Moscow’s empire would go on for ever. In their remarkably plainspoken memoir, A World Transformed, George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft reacted to the events of 1989 as though they were reruns of similar Eastern Bloc tumults from previous decades. What they feared most was a replay of Hungary 1956: “I did not want to encourage a course of events which might turn violent and get out of hand,” Bush wrote, “and which we then couldn’t—or wouldn’t—support, leaving people stranded at the barricades.”

That the Soviet empire imploded quietly was an astounding stroke of luck, and the principal strategic result—the reunification of Germany in NATO—was an achievement of immense proportions, the seeming resolution of centuries of bloodshed. But such an epoch-defining event proved disorienting, perhaps understandably so, to men such as Bush and Scowcroft. They had grown up in a world where the aim of statecraft was stability, managing and preventing great-power confrontations, and defending the frontiers of freedom rather than exploiting the weaknesses of autocracies.

So if they were coldly cautious in guiding Mikhail Gorbachev to ground in Moscow, Bush and his lieutenants froze in place when faced with the Tiananmen Square crisis and massacres in Beijing. The president was deeply and personally involved with China policy—although, as unofficial ambassador in Beijing, he had been largely out of the loop when Henry Kissinger engineered his “opening” during the Nixon years—and felt he knew Chinese leaders well. He embraced the gospel of the “U.S.-China relationship” as a pillar of U.S. strategy. Tiananmen suggested a degree of great-power instability and uncertainty beyond what Bush, Scowcroft, and company could handle.

Bush’s caution and moderation seemed to receive its reward in 1990 and 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened to continue his offensive into northern Saudi Arabia. Bush’s “new world order” was in fact a defense of the status quo, of state sovereignty in a chaotic time. Thus he was able to get support from the United Nations and, in particular, in exchange for relief from sanctions imposed after Tiananmen, the abstention of China in the Security Council vote on the critical go-to-war resolution.

In geostrategic terms, it might be said that Bush was prepared to accept what was on offer in Europe, unwilling to rock the boat in East Asia, and bold in expanding the American position in the Middle East, all the while positioning himself as the defender of the traditional state system. He was dealt a surprisingly strong hand and played it competently, if perhaps not for all it was worth. Schooled in traditional great-power balancing, he found it hard to chart a lasting course for history’s sole superpower; Bush had no template for the end of history and wanted any new world order to be as much as possible like the old world order, with its familiar rules.

For Bill Clinton, the apparent absence of international competition was a holiday from history, or at least the traditional exercise of power. Geopolitics had been superseded—at least in the academic fashion of the times as displayed in the work of Frenchman Pascal Lorot and American Edward Luttwak—by “geoeconomics,” a modern version of mercantilism wherein states competed not for territories but for market share, and commerce was less a source of profit than an “element of national power.” The 1990s were also the high-water mark of influence for New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who popularized notions of “globalization,” arguing that advancing technologies were changing the nature of human societies and politics.

The Clinton administration tried to stay in tune with the times. Indeed, it produced new national security strategies at a record clip, generating four in eight years and revising several of them multiple times. But strategies that are working don’t get changed; innovation in strategy is usually a measure of failure or, in this case, fad. By the time Clinton had his final say in December 2000 with A National Security Strategy for a Global Age, he was in end-zone-dance mode. “As we enter the new millennium,” he wrote:

In other words, if George H. W. Bush, the last Depression-World War II president, could never quite believe his strategic luck in living to see the end of the Cold War, Bill Clinton, by the end of his term, had come to take it for granted. Indeed, in the reckoning of his grand strategy, “prosperity” had come to take precedence over “security.” The priorities of the American Founders—”life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—had been inverted.

To be fair, Clinton was clever enough to know that “the most important matter is what we now make of this moment,” but he had regularly shied away from the implication that this might mean the use of military force or hard power of any sort. The Clinton years were marked by the “Black Hawk Down” withdrawal from Somalia, inaction in Rwanda and Bosnia, and “pinprick” cruise-missile raids in response to al Qaeda attacks on embassies. Arguably, the most consequential achievement of the administration was to secure the onetime “butchers of Beijing”—the phrase used by candidate Clinton in 1992 to ridicule the Bush response to Tiananmen—as members of the World Trade Organization. Even the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, a move that has had serious consequences, was sold as a cost-free measure.

In sum, Bill Clinton was as surprised by the post-Cold War world as his predecessor had been. If Bush was wedded to stability, Clinton seemed to think that politics was infinitely plastic, that after millennia of irrational and violent behavior, humanity had at last come to its senses. International law and organizations would create and maintain order. The United States might preside—we were, after all, “the indispensable nation”—but it would only compel under extreme circumstances and after consultation with others. Indeed, Clinton may have “made” less of his moment—in the sense of expending blood, treasure, national resources, or presidential attention—than Bush made of his. Clinton’s energies were absorbed at home, first in trying to change the health care system and later in fighting, tooth and nail, to preserve his political career. He later lamented that lacking a great villain to fight, he had been denied the opportunity to be a historically great president and thus may have overlooked the opportunity he did have.

By contrast, George W. Bush brought a sense of moral mission to the White House. The born-again Bush had campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” not simply to take the rough edges off the Newt Gingrich-era Republican party but also to bring the good news of peace, liberty, and prosperity to all. Including the rest of the world, as he made plain in his 2001 inaugural speech:

But if Bush had a “freedom agenda” from the beginning, the attacks of September 11, 2001, cemented his faith all the more. Beyond avenging the harm done by al Qaeda and removing their Taliban hosts from power in Afghanistan, or later bringing the long-running conflict with Saddam Hussein to a conclusion—actions even a cold-blooded Roman emperor might have taken—Bush determined to remake repressive societies into representative republics. To be sure, there was a strategic rationale behind it all, in that liberal democracies have been unlikely to go to war with one another. Still, it was the sense of moral purpose that seemed to drive Bush, especially once “mission accomplished” turned into a “long, hard slog.”

Bush and his “Vulcan” lieutenants were convinced that the post-Cold War world was indeed a moment of American “primacy.” And to whom much is given, much is required. The administration was divided, however. Many, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, thought the way to exploit these advantages was to further accentuate and preserve a favorable great-power balance. Thus, Rumsfeld sought to “transform” the U.S. military, to leap ahead several decades to dissuade potential rivals; the message for China and others was “don’t even think about it.” The “nation-building” that bogged the Clinton administration down in the Balkans was not for them.

Taken together with the certainty that liberty was an “inborn hope,” part of human DNA rather than a learned behavior shaped by culture, the rapid triumphs of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions proved dangerously deceptive; Bush could have his cake and eat it, too. Sole-superpower America was both militarily and ideologically irresistible. Sunni insurgents were no more than Baath party “dead-enders,” Saddamists on the run; the downtrodden Shiites of Iraq were our natural partners, looking to breathe free not to exact revenge.

Not until the 2007 Iraq “surge” did President Bush begin to match his power to his purpose. The last two years of his administration give a tantalizing taste of what the post-Cold War might have been. Bush, who had styled himself the “Decider,” took a much more active role, paying close attention to military affairs and giving constant teleconference therapy to Hamid Karzai in Kabul and Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad—two very flawed leaders whom Bush disciplined well enough. It was, alas, too little and too late.

The intense focus on Iraq, in particular, left the Bush administration open to charges of missing the larger geostrategic picture. This was hardly fair—Bush solidified the budding relationship with India and helped Japan take its first steps toward increasing its military capacity, and, with the exception of the 2008 Georgia invasion and the silly “look into Putin’s soul” quip, he had a generally sober attitude toward Russia, negotiating further nuclear arms reductions. But it was effective. It gave Barack Obama cover for the global withdrawals that have characterized his presidency.

For Obama promised not only to transform American society and “end” U.S. involvement in Iraq and other wars in the Islamic world, he was going to reboot grand strategy for the 21st century. In particular, this demanded a “pivot to the Pacific.” Not only was China’s rise the salient great-power question of the era, but also the economic growth across the region was going to make it an “Asian century.”

The debate over the Obama legacy was joined months before he left office and will no doubt rage for decades to come. But he’s been, intentionally so, a consequential president. And the geopolitical consequences have been devastating to the United States. While America remains fundamentally strong in the world—a superb, if smaller than needed, military; a sound, if underperforming, economy; a world full of rich, if doubting, allies—we are divided at home and uncertain of our course. The world itself is sickening. Europe, becoming unmoored from America, is governed by elites of questionable legitimacy and competence, prey to Vladimir Putin’s poking and prodding, and awash with immigrants it cannot easily assimilate—or protect against. Across the Middle East, Iran is ascendant, the Sunni states are in turmoil, Turkey is governed by a paranoid potentate with Islamist leanings, and Russia is renewing its influence. America’s absence has been an accelerant to all these trends. In East Asia, Obama’s “rebalance” has seen China push its way across the South China Sea in search of tributary states, substituting nationalism and territorial expansion for economic growth, and positioning Xi Jinping to make himself another Mao.

In sum, we have come to a point of renewed geopolitical competition and greater “multipolarity” than we’ve had since 1945. The reality is increasing conflict, even if for the moment it is expressed in proxy wars (which we’re losing) rather than direct great-power conflict. At the same time, the prospects for such conflict seem substantial, especially as there is one very disgruntled rising power in China—with at least two centuries’ worth of national humiliation as baggage—which, despite its long history, has no experience as a global power. And of course there is a second near-nuclear power, Iran, with at least regional hegemonic ambitions if not millenarian motivations.

Obama has been both the like-Bush and the anti-Bush: as certain that he’s been called to do special things as he is reluctant ever to employ American power. Unlike his predecessor, Obama has not learned anything new while in office. In his many end-of-term interviews, he’s been adamant that he’s made no mistakes. The failure to enforce his chemical-weapons “red line” in Syria was not a loss of credibility but a moment of courage: “I’m very proud of this moment,” he told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic.

This is the world President Trump inherits. He was elected to “make America great again,” and he’s got his work cut out for him.

Liberty-loving, English-speaking peoples have been here before, as I wrote in the October 3, 2016, issue of The Weekly Standard (“Reversing Decline: The example of Elizabethan England”). The Glorious Revolution of the late-17th century marked such a recovery, as did the American Revolution, the Civil War (often described as the “Second American Revolution”), and, in many ways, the post-World War II period. Our times may seem bleak, but they pale in comparison to 1688, 1775, 1861, or 1941.

It’s helpful to think of these past Anglo-American revivals not as revolutions, but as “Whig restorations,” meaning an adaptation of existing political principles and strategic habits to new circumstances. These moments have much in common. They were provoked by security crises governments could not handle, at least to the satisfaction of the larger political nation. They resulted in wars against threatening autocrats: Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV of France, George III, the Confederate “slavocracy,” Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia, all of whom seemed militarily invincible but in the end were brought low by the blundering but durable forces of more representative polities. Victory in each case was defined by the expansion of “liberties”—whether that meant the power of smaller states or the rights of individuals.

Whether Donald Trump is a man to lead a Whiggish restoration is not the right question. The Strategic 8-Ball says “ask again later.” It is better to know what the character of our revival will be—better to let the leader be defined by the purpose than the other way around—and to know where we’ve been before deciding where to go.

Thomas Donnelly is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.