Episode 1: Dawn of Unipolarity

American foreign policy after the Cold War

The 1990s were a decade of transformation and optimism. Teenagers were listening to grunge rock and hip hop on their walkmans. Flannels and jean jackets became staples of ‘90s fashion. And seemingly without warning, the Cold War was over, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and the United States emerged as the sole superpower. America’s unipolar moment had arrived. Today’s world seems more dangerous and competitive than that of 30 years ago. So how did we get here?

In this episode of None Of The Above, the Institute for Global Affairs’ Mark Hannah revisits some of the most pivotal events of the 1990s, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Gulf War, with the help of Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University. They discuss successes and failures of America’s efforts to shape the new world order. Former NPR correspondent Deborah Amos and retired ambassador Thomas Pickering also provide personal insights and commentary.

Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine. He is the author of several books on international relations including The Hell of Good Intentions, Revolutions and War, and The Origins of Alliances.

Deborah Amos is a Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton University. Over the course of her award-winning career, she served as an international correspondent for NPR, ABC, and PBS. Her reporting has largely focused on the Middle East and refugees. She was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.

Thomas Pickering is a retired diplomat who served as US ambassador to the United Nations, India, and Russia throughout the 1990s. He also served as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under President Clinton from 1997 to 2000. He achieved the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in American diplomacy.

Transcript:

STEPHEN WALT: I think the 1990s were a period of actually less American intervention, and there's a simple explanation. We were already very secure. We're on top of the world. There's no big enemies out there.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to season six of None of the Above, a podcast of the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group. I’m your host, Mark Hannah.

Usually, our episodes respond to what’s going on in the world around us: conflicts we’re currently seeing play out across the world, elections and their consequences, and the present moment that we’re living in.

But for this season, we wanted to turn back the clock.

Archival: Soviet prime minister Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed from power… Bill Clinton proves his title, “The Comeback Kid.” He is the projected winner as President of the United States… Overseas now to Bosnia, a UN convoy taken hostage has been released… Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa.

HANNAH: The 1990s were a pivotal decade for the United States and the world. It was a moment of transformation and optimism. The Cold War was over, and a new, interconnected digital age began to take shape. Jean jackets were in style, grunge rock ruled the airwaves, and heady ideas about American power and America’s place in the world filled the air.

New York businessman Donald Trump had just first flirted with a run for the presidency as an independent candidate, and he was mostly complaining on prime-time television about low-cost, high-quality imports from Japan.

Although we’re looking about 30 years to the past, there are still echoes from that moment that we hear today.Whether it’s America’s relationship with China or the Global War on Terror, the 1990s explain a lot about the issues we face today and can help us understand the ways in which our world is changing.

Now kicking off his second term as president, Donald Trump has challenged many of the orthodoxies of the post-Cold War international order.

So we’re going to bring you a series of ten episodes all about the 1990s and all focused on major geopolitical themes to bring today’s conversations about foreign policy and geopolitics into sharper focus.

Our story begins with one of the most significant events of the 20th century—the end of the Cold War.

George H.W. Bush: What is at stake is more than one small country. It is a big idea. A new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. Such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children’s future.

HANNAH: That was President George H.W. Bush delivering his State of the Union address in 1991. The Soviet Union would dissolve just eleven months later.

Bush declared that a new world order had replaced the Cold War competition which defined the last four decades. Containing and rolling back the spread of communism had been America’s main foreign policy objective since the end of World War II. But America’s superpower rival, the Soviet Union, was now crumbling from the inside, and the United States was on the precipice of a unipolar moment, one in which it assumed the role of the world’s sole superpower.

Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist who coined the phrase “unipolar moment,” had this to say in 2004.

Charles Krauthammer: On December 26th, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born. Something utterly new. A unipolar world dominated by a single superpower, unchecked by any rival when with decisive reach at every corner of the globe. This is a staggering new development in human history, not seen since the fall of Rome.

HANNAH: So, what would the defining feature of America’s new role be?

WALT: Well, I think the central word that comes to mind immediately is “hubris.”

HANNAH: This is Stephen Walt. He’s a professor of international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

WALT: The end of the Cold War was seen as this extraordinary vindication of the United States and indeed the Western liberal order. The Soviet Union had been the evil empire for decades. We were always told what a formidable adversary it was and how we needed to focus laser-like on containing Soviet power, etc.

And suddenly, beginning in the mid-1980s, but then after that, it begins to come unglued. The Warsaw Pact dissolves, and then eventually the Soviet Union comes apart into constituent pieces as well. There were doubts, even in the late ‘80s, as to whether or not this was really happening. And then it did.

So, you could argue that the American foreign policy elite, with some very rare exceptions, was sort of drunk with success at this point, and not surprisingly, given everything that had gone on.

By the way, it was not just that the United States had won the Cold War along with its allies. It seemed like everyone was now embracing American ideals. You have the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe, where it’s not just that they want to be free of Soviet control, they want to be capitalist, and they want to be democracies. So the American model, if you will, seems to be contagious at this point.

One final event that plays into all of this is the first Gulf War, when George H.W. Bush is president, before the Soviet Union is gone. But this is a smashing military success. It goes much better than some people had predicted.

So you enter the 1990s, you get to the Clinton administration, and you have this extraordinary sense of optimism that the world is heading in our direction. The tides of history are flowing America's way, that the American model is now the only game in town, and therefore, spreading those liberal values is going to be, first of all, good for everybody, and also easy to do because most of the world wants to embrace them. So there won't be a whole lot of pushback, won't be a whole lot of resistance here.

That's why I mean this becomes a decade that's really characterized by enormous hubris by the United States, and very little discussion of how this might go wrong.

HANNAH: “Drunk on success,” as Stephen puts it, the United States was ready to remake the world in its image.

The Cold War strategy of containment had recognized and worked with the constraints of a bipolar world. Now no longer facing a great power rival, the US turned to a new strategy to shape the new world order, and that was liberal hegemony.

WALT: Liberal hegemony was a grand strategy that basically tried to take the Western liberal order that had been created after World War II and largely to wage the Cold War and make it a global liberal order. By “liberal,” I mean an order in which the states in it are all democratic, they all have market economies, they have a rule of law both within countries, but also largely between them, that their relations are managed by a set of international institutions. So it's liberal because it reflects a certain basic set of liberal values.

It's hegemonic because the United States saw itself as the center of this system, that we would be the benevolent hegemon that would both manage the system, but also use its power in a variety of different ways to expand and take what had been a liberal order in the West and make it a global order.

People were optimistic in this period. They thought this was going to happen everywhere. This was the natural tendency of history that gradually, China, as it became wealthy, as its middle class grew, would eventually shift and become a democracy, a multi-party system of some kind as well, and it would join this happy club of liberal democracies.

You remember that the Clinton administration slogan was that there was a strategy of engagement and enlargement. We're going to engage the world, and we're going to enlarge the sphere of democratic rule. So again, this is a very optimistic vision, that as these liberal values are spreading, when we're going to help them spread even more quickly, the world is going to become more prosperous, more stable, more peaceful. It's going to be good for America, and it's going to be good for the rest of the world.

HANNAH: So the 1990s found the US on top of the world, but America’s former rival was not faring so well. Mikhail Gorbachev delivered his farewell address, and the Soviet Union formally broke up the day after Christmas in 1991.

Boris Yeltsin succeeded Gorbachev as President of Russia and attempted to steer the country through painful economic and political reforms.

WALT: The 1990s were a terrible decade for the former Soviet Union and subsequent Russian Republic. The economy went into free fall. With the advice of some American economists, they adopted these strategies of shock therapy, which put lots of people out of work.

Suddenly, people began to yearn for the stability, even if it had been poorer, in the former Soviet days. A bunch of oligarchs got very, very, very rich. Boris Yeltsin proved to be a not particularly good or vigorous leader, as well. So, you have a society that has now gone through a wrenching process of social transformation where nothing is working out very well for them.

And not surprisingly, the allure of being part of the West, of embracing capitalism, etc., began to tarnish very quickly. Also, it's not just in the former Soviet Union. Again, we, in America, had a very linear view that these countries have thrown off communism, they're going to embrace democracy, they're going to embrace the market, etc., and so all of Eastern Europe is going to be reliably democratic.

We need to help it a little bit, bringing it into NATO, getting these countries into the EU will solidify it. And that has worked to some degree. I don't want to suggest this was a complete failure, but in both Hungary and Poland, you rather quickly began to see a backlash against some of the social changes that this entailed: the resurgence of very powerful national feelings, the resistance to Brussels as a part of the EU, or the United States pushing these countries to change some of their own practices and values, and eventually—and this is somewhat later—growing fear of migration, losing the national essence, as well.

So what we thought was going to be a linear process that led straight to a harmonious liberal democratic world was not anything but, and you get a very profound backlash in a number of Eastern European countries. Not surprisingly, given that their own political histories were very different than ours.

And of course, the same thing happens in the former Soviet Union, or subsequently Russia. When Yeltsin finally leaves power, he's replaced by Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin is not just a much more formidable leader, but someone who wants to defend a certain sense of Russian values against what he sees as the dangerous encroachment of the West and our attempt to make Russia just like Germany or just like the United States.

HANNAH: Vladimir Putin would go on to call the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” But as the 1990s wore on and Russia grew more isolated, few US policymakers saw the need to adjust the strategy of liberal hegemony.

Bill Clinton: I want to discuss what America must do to secure democracy’s triumph around the world, and most of all, in the former Soviet Empire. No national security issue is more urgent, nowhere is our country’s imperative more clear. I believe it is time for America to lead a global alliance for democracy as united and steadfast as the global alliance that resisted and ultimately triumphed over communism. If we don’t take the lead, no one else can, and no one else will.

WALT: What's striking, again, about the 1990s is that there was hardly any debate over what America's posture in the rest of the world should be.

There were a few people who said, Maybe we don't need to be in NATO anymore now that the Soviet Union is gone. Maybe we don't need to have the same set of relations in Asia that we have. But those voices fell silent very quickly or were marginalized. And instead, it was like, No, we should keep everything we've got, and in fact, let's try to make it bigger.

You did get debates on narrow policy issues. So, there was a genuine debate in the first term of the Clinton administration over whether or not we should do NATO enlargement, bring new countries into NATO, or do something called Partnership for Peace, which was not membership in NATO but was kind of a halfway house. It involved various forms of civil military cooperation with Eastern European countries. And very importantly, Russia was not excluded from Partnership for Peace. It could have participated in that had it wished to.

And there was a debate. Secretary of Defense William Perry, for example, thought Partnership for Peace was the way to go, NATO enlargement was a bad idea. He lost that particular fight to Warren Christopher and Richard Holbrooke and eventually the people who persuaded Bill Clinton to go the enlargement route.

HANNAH: There is so much more to say about NATO enlargement and post-Soviet Russia during the 1990s. But fear not, we will get into these topics in episode two.

WALT: So you have some of those debates on certain policy issues, but the overall thrust was, Let's take what we have and continue to try and expand it and build it, as opposed to saying, We've won the Cold War. We don't need to run the entire world. We actually should do some retrenchment and, in fact, should work on fixing more problems here at home. That argument really never got very far after 1992.

HANNAH: The first major test of the US-led world order was the Gulf War. Now, Saddam Hussein has been a recurring character in the saga of US foreign policy, and in July of 1990, he ordered thousands of Iraqi troops to the border with the tiny oil-rich country of Kuwait. In August, just a month later, Iraq invaded.

WALT: There had been a long-running dispute between Saddam and Kuwait and also Saudi Arabia, fallout from the Iran-Iraq war. He owed them a lot of money. He wanted them to forgive the debts. He wanted them to help raise oil prices, and they were not cooperating because they wanted to keep Iraq weak, right? And this eventually leads him to say, Oh, I can solve this problem. Kuwait has no allies. Kuwait is weakly defended. It's got a lot of oil, I'll just take it over.

And the Bush administration eventually decided this could not stand, and they organized a multinational coalition, which the United States was overwhelmingly the leading member, to retake Kuwait, throw out the Iraqi army, do as much damage to the Iraqi army as possible, and then, at the end of the war, establish, through the United Nations, a whole regime designed to look for weapons of mass destruction, keep Iraq from rebuilding its military forces in various ways.

HANNAH: So, that’s the short version, at least. But Saddam Hussein had not always been the persona non grata he became in the nineties.

DEBORAH AMOS: First of all, Saddam had been our ally. We gave him agricultural credits. We wanted him to move away from Iran completely. He was one of our favorite dictators. It was only when he crossed the border and invaded Kuwait that that changed, and it changed dramatically.

HANNAH: That’s Deborah Amos, who witnessed the end of the Cold War first-hand as a correspondent for National Public Radio. This is why you probably recognize her voice. Deb had previously reported from Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, then China on the heels of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Now, she was on the ground in Kuwait, not long after Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

AMOS: I think the nineties was a decade where so much seemed possible, certainly in the early part of that decade. The Cold War was over. The Berlin Wall had fallen. It was kind of remarkable, coming into the nineties, what a time it was and what you could imagine. So you can see things like the Responsibility to Protect, would come out of that moment. This age of possibilities. But reality set in pretty quickly. ’90 is when the Gulf War starts. That requires some decisions from the Americans, from the Europeans to come in on that war.

By ’91, I am in Saudi Arabia. We all got quickly dispatched, and the Saudis were allowing us all in. So I spent almost the next year in Dhahran, sometimes in Riyadh, but mostly in Dhahran, and went in with US soldiers into Kuwait.

I think it was the first real challenge to the international order at the time. As I remember, it was Margaret Thatcher who essentially said to George Bush, Get a backbone. We're going to have to do this. I don't think the Americans really wanted to do it, but the Brits understood that you had to, and they did. So, it was a call-up for everybody.

HANNAH: Operation Desert Shield marked the American military’s troop buildup in Saudi Arabia in preparation for war.

Then, US-led coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm, a bombing campaign followed by a ground offensive into Iraq under the auspices of the United Nations resolution. Within a mere five weeks, Saddam’s forces were defeated and the war was over.

George H.W. Bush: It was not only a victory for Kuwait but a victory for all the coalition partners. This is a victory for the United Nations, for all mankind, for the rule of law, and for what is right.

WALT: The lesson that many people drew from the first Gulf War was the United States has almost magical military powers. Before the war, people had been predicting we might lose 5,000 men, 10,000 men. Saddam Hussein seems to have believed that, as well. The United States lost only a few hundred.

Stunning military victory—very fast, very quick, etc. So the lesson many people—don't mess with the United States and Americans—learned that when we put our minds to it, we can really do remarkable things with our military. There are some other lessons from the Gulf War that we kind of forgot about.

One is, it was a war fought with great international legitimacy. The Bush administration, this is the first Bush administration, went to the United Nations Security Council and got authorization. So it was completely legal to do what we had done.

Second, and very importantly, at the end of the war, we didn't succumb to victory disease, right?

They stopped. They didn't go to Baghdad. They didn't try to topple Saddam Hussein, because as then-defense secretary Dick Cheney said, Once you did that, you would own Iraq. You'd have to govern the place. Who was going to run it? It was a deeply divided society. We had no idea how to run it, as well.

So the Bush administration very successfully organized the diplomacy, got international legitimacy, and didn't let its war aims expand after we were successful.

HANNAH: Speaking of international legitimacy, here’s retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Among his many diplomatic appointments, he served as the US Ambassador to the United Nations from 1989 through 1992. He was a key player in rallying international support for the defense of Kuwait.

THOMAS PICKERING: The international community saw the US as having enormous military and strategic capabilities. We had demonstrated, over the previous two decades of the Cold War, a certain amount of wisdom in the presence of our secretaries of state in how and in what way we could provide leadership that is both thought and action in the direction of problem resolution that, in one way or another, caught the attention of the rest of the world.

Using the opportunities provided for us under the UN Charter in the United Nations gave us the basis for legalizing, in an international sense, what we were doing as a matter of policy choices and how we were carrying it out, including the decision to go in the United Nations for an authorization in the Security Council to put forces into the Middle East and to use those forces in one way or another to defeat Saddam's invasion and capture of Kuwait, a sovereign state and member of the United Nations, which had counted on it for its protection and the use of the international community in coordination. And we helped to try to lead it, but we were enormously aided by the British and the French who worked with us and as well, at key times, by China and by the Soviet Union, and then the Russian Federation, which succeeded the Soviet Union in the United Nations seat.

HANNAH: Getting a resolution through the UN Security Council was no easy feat.

PICKERING: President Bush and Secretary Baker played a large role, at various times, in convincing reluctant Soviet Union leaders to come along.

HANNAH: For many, US-Soviet cooperation showed the promise of international relations in a world unconstrained by great power rivalry. Liberal internationalists hailed the impressive multinational coalition of the Gulf War as a kind-of vindication of a US-led rules-based international order.

The Clinton administration will continue to seek UN authorization for military operations in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. The new world order was unipolar, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the US wanted to act unilaterally.

WALT: I would give the Clinton administration credit for understanding that when you're as powerful as the United States is, anything you can do to convey a certain sense of self-restraint that you're not unmindful of the interests of others, that you understand that others may be alarmed by your power, etc., and therefore, if you can achieve your aims, but do it as part of a coalition, part of a team, have a sense of legitimacy—that's good. The principal way to do that is operating through the United Nations. This was a group of people who also believed, I think, very strongly, in the value of international institutions, especially those that we largely control. That's not true of the UN, but it is true of institutions like NATO as well.

And so, for example, one of the trouble spots in the 1990s, the Balkan Wars that came with the breakup of Yugoslavia, there's a case where the United States worked within the European Union, although we are not a member there, and within the United Nations, to have a response that had a certain amount of international support.

HANNAH: Despite the military success of the First Gulf War, we should not view its legacy through rose-colored glasses.

AMOS: I spent most of my career in the Middle East. So for me, the failures were more obvious because that's where they happened. And I would say that the almost-decade of the containment of Saddam Hussein by the Clinton administration—it was a humanitarian disaster for Iraqis.

HANNAH: While the US would not pursue regime change in Iraq until a decade later, the Bush and Clinton administrations adopted policies that sought to weaken Saddam’s hold on power.

The oil embargo and sanctions levied against Iraq in order to destabilize Saddam led to a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died from disease and starvation.

AMOS: It is what turned so many in the Middle East against the Americans. They blame them for that because they could see it. And it went on for a very long time. I mean, mind you, it was only towards the end of the decade, 1998, that we had the bombing campaign against Saddam by the Clinton administration.

Who knows what would have happened in Iraq with Al-Qaeda, with 9/11, had there been a different policy in the nineties towards Saddam? In some ways, of course, he contributed to the chaos of those years by, in some ways, pretending that he had WMDs—weapons of mass destruction—when he really didn't. And that is why the Clinton administration wanted to keep the lid on him. But a lid wasn't enough for him.

There's a famous quote from those days from Madeleine Albright, who asked about the cost, and she said it didn't really matter to her.

Lesley Stahl: We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?

Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.

AMOS: And that quote has lived on forever in the region.

HANNAH: Iraq was not the only place where a humanitarian crisis was brewing. In Rwanda, a civil war between the majority Hutu government forces and the Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, turned into a genocide in 1994. Over the course of 100 days, about 800,000 people were killed.

Meanwhile, violence was escalating between ethnic groups after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. Bosnian Serbs laid siege to the capital of Sarajevo and carried out ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. This culminated in the massacre of about 8,000 people in the town of Srebrenica in 1995.

To some, the power that the United States wielded at that time meant it was the country’s duty to intervene and prevent such atrocities. This outlook eventually became known as Responsibility to Protect or R2P.

WALT: The Responsibility to Protect was an attempt to promote a new, essentially almost legal, doctrine. Instead of the norm of nonintervention, where we're not supposed to intervene in other countries, except under very narrow circumstances, rather that they were trying to convince the world that all countries had a responsibility to intervene if some other government was either oppressing its own people in extreme ways, or unable to protect its own people. Maybe it wanted to, but was incapable for whatever set of reasons.

And under those circumstances, it was not just permissible to intervene, it was actually a requirement. You had a moral, maybe even a legal, responsibility to do so. It was an attempt, actually, to prevent things like the Rwanda genocide from taking place, and as it's unfolding, nobody's really willing to intervene from the outside.

People could say, Well, that would violate the principle of nonintervention, and the circumstances aren't quite right for it, and maybe somebody else should do it. And by the time all of that hand-holding has gone by, and hand-wringing, the disaster has already taken place.

So this was a campaign within the UN system and certainly within civil society. Lots of NGOs got behind it. And it made some progress. It never got, I think, fully adopted or embraced by other major powers.

And of course, by the way, one of the barriers or obstacles that this movement faced was people saying, Well, gee, you developed this norm, people are going to start taking advantage of it. They'll be using it as an excuse to do things that they're doing for other reasons.

The advocates, of course, had a response to that. They tried to set up—here are the conditions that must be met in order to invoke this new doctrine, etc. These were thoughtful people, I think, trying to do the right thing.

The problem is that they were not going to be able to convince most world leaders to make substantial sacrifices for the benefit of others. And that's ultimately what it called for because most political leaders care first and foremost about what their own citizens want, what their own citizens are willing to do, not necessarily about the fate of some people who are suffering.

HANNAH: Despite this push for intervention, the administration was reluctant to use military force where it was not considered in the country’s vital strategic interests.

WALT: I think the 1990s were a period of actually less American intervention. And there's a simple explanation. We were already very secure. We're on top of the world. There's no big enemies out there.

After the nineties, what changes, of course, is the global War on Terror. 9/11 comes along and suddenly, anything or anyone that we think might be supporting terrorism is a potential enemy, and we're going to overthrow them, too. And that's what gets you into Iraq and some of the other rather heavy-handed activities in the Middle East as well.

This is also, by the way, just all a reminder that when you push a great power, even a very secure great power like the United States, and get it scared enough, some of its values go out the window. It no longer cares as much about whether you're democratic or not, it no longer cares that much about overthrowing you if it thinks it's going to gain some kind of strategic advantage. And you get better behavior from countries when they're feeling relatively secure, as we were in the 1990s.

HANNAH: Public opinion also placed some constraints on US foreign policy throughout the 1990s.

WALT: It's worth remembering that—what was the slogan of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign? What was the soundbite? “It's the economy, stupid.” And he's running against an incumbent president who has just led the United States and its allies to this smashing victory in Gulf War I. So at that point, in 1991, the election's a year away, you think George Bush is riding high. He's in great shape. The Americans will really reward him for being a great statesman and leader.

And of course, what Bill Clinton does is, he doesn't deal with foreign policy very much. He talks about how the United States has to focus, now, on things at home.

I might add that every subsequent president does this too. They run for office promising to do less abroad and do more at home. What they do when they get into office is usually another question.

Bill Clinton also told one of his aides, George Stephanopoulos, at one point, that Americans are basically isolationist. That was his view. The American people, you really have to work hard to get them to do anything big and ambitious abroad if it's going to cost them, if it's going to cost them soldiers, if it's going to affect their taxes, or things like that.

And as I said before, one of the reasons they were willing to pursue liberal hegemony is because they thought it would be easy. You wouldn't have to fight a lot of wars to do it. The whole world was moving in this direction. We were just going to sort of goose the process, accelerate it, push it along in various ways.

I think it was Fareed Zakaria who wrote an essay in the nineties referring to this as a “hollow hegemony”—that we were sort of governing the world, but not if it was going to cost us anything. And you see that, of course, in Clinton's withdrawal of American troops from Somalia after some rangers are killed in a firefight, his refusal to get involved to stop the Rwandan genocide.

The fact that when he does get involved in Balkan peacekeeping, he's not sending a lot of troops there. He turns that over to the Europeans. He fights the Kosovo War from the air. No American ground troops there. Bill Clinton understood that there wasn't much appetite in the American body politic for foreign adventures that might actually be costly.

Because in the 1990s, Americans already knew they were on top of the world. Why do we have to go to war someplace, as well? I think he understood that.

HANNAH: Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996, leading the US through the end of the decade and into the 21st century.

Bill Clinton: In these four years, we have been touched by tragedy, exhilarated by challenge, strengthened by achievement. America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation.

WALT: Bill Clinton was an exceptionally lucky president in a variety of ways. He started a bunch of economic policies—deregulation of financial markets, for example—that didn't really come home to roost until the financial crisis of 2007, 2008.

And similarly, he did a number of things in foreign policy where the consequences weren't realized until his successors were in office and he was busy retired. So he had this policy in the Gulf of dual containment, where after the first Gulf War, the United States was going to contain Iraq and Iran simultaneously.

These were two countries that didn't like each other, yet we were going to be opposed to both. That required the United States to keep a lot of troops in Saudi Arabia and becomes one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons that Osama bin Laden turns and starts to go after the United States in the region, because American troops are infidels that shouldn't be on the sacred land of Islam in Saudi Arabia. And that's one of the reasons why we get 9/11, but 9/11 happens under George W. Bush, not on Clinton's watch.

And I would say much the same thing about NATO enlargement. Russia was really unhappy when we began to expand NATO, but they would have probably accepted the first wave, maybe even the second wave as well. But a point of reaction to this really doesn't kick in until Russia has recovered, and we continue to push it, especially after 2008 with the invitation to Ukraine.

So once again, Clinton gets lucky in that some of the things he began don't really come home to roost. The other warning sign we should have seen in the 1990s, again, apart from the continued rise of China, which is big and we're not paying enough attention to it, is that it turns out a lot of these rogue states that we didn't like, that we saw as the sort of lingering barriers to, the strategy of liberal hegemony, they turned out to be pretty resilient. Pretty stubborn.

We never got a deal with North Korea that worked. Iran continued to be resistant. It made several overtures to the Clinton administration, which we, by large, rejected, and they didn't fold their tents. Libya didn't fold its tent in this period under Gaddafi.

We had to fight a war with Serbia, a tiny little country, in order to get it to do what we wanted as well. And that should have taught us that the mighty United States, at the peak of its power, has trouble managing local politics in lots of different places.

Now, Clinton didn't try to do anything as stupid as the Iraq War, but that should have been an indication that the world might not be conforming to our visions quite as much as we thought it would back when the 1990s began.

HANNAH: As a scholar of international relations, Stephen identifies as a realist. So I asked him about the problem with liberal hegemony from a realist perspective.

WALT: There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. In fact, some realists would argue that that's what all states would like to have. You'd like to be the hegemonic power, face no challengers at all, and be able to dictate events in lots of different places.

The problem is that's almost impossible to do. Even if you're the United States of America, you've got no more than five percent of the world's population. You have no more than 20 to 25 percent of the world economy. You're bigger than everybody else on the block, but there are other powers on the block.

And very importantly, one of those powers, China, was growing very rapidly, had lots more people. Its economy is forging ahead quite rapidly, and we didn't pay enough attention to that in the nineties.

And second, Russia is not going to be flat on its back forever. The 1990s are a period of artificial American dominance and artificial Russian weakness. Russia is not an economic peer for the United States, but it was not going to be as weak as it was in 1995 or 1997, once we got into the aughts, once oil prices recovered, once they managed to stabilize their situation. And so what a realist would have said, Look, you're going to have a great moment here, and you'll be able to do a variety of things because you don't face a whole lot of opposition.

But that opposition is going to come back at some point, and you're going to have to deal with greater resistance, greater opposition, even if everything you're trying to do around the world succeeds. And of course, as we now know, many of the projects we took on in different parts of the world backfired rather badly.

HANNAH: Another problem with unipolarity is that the US did not always see the value in engaging diplomatically with its adversaries. Thomas Pickering knows a thing or two about diplomacy, having served as ambassador not only to the United Nations, but also to India and Russia throughout the 1990s.

PICKERING: We have several problems in American thinking. One of those is the tendency to demonize opponents. That has the unfortunate problem of creating real obstacles to opening conversations and beginning communications with people that you have acquired this national capacity so to dislike, that it becomes, put it this way, an emblem of your disloyalty to the country you are serving, if you believe that communications with the other side has any fruitful value to it. And to me, this is an anti-diplomatic point of view that doesn't serve the interests of the state.

HANNAH: The events set in motion in the aftermath of the Cold War have had enduring effects on today’s world. Looking back, the nineties were a relatively peaceful time for the United States. But this false sense of security would not last, and the decade that followed saw the US invade the countries of Afghanistan and Iraq after a devastating terrorist attack on the US in 9/11 2001. Those conflicts would tie us up for the next twenty years, cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, and destabilize the region.

WALT: I think there were two legacies.

One is the 1990s set in motion a set of policies that were eventually going to come back to haunt us. And I've already described what some of those were. The negative implications, the blowback of various kinds wasn't realized until some years later, but those policies began in the 1990s and ultimately did real harm.

The second thing it did though was, I think, a generational issue. Those of us who grew up in the Cold War, an era where there really was serious great power opposition, I think understood that you had to conduct foreign policy in as serious a fashion as possible. You had to be mindful of risks. You had to avoid taking on big utopian projects. And you had to be wary of other major powers, most notably the Soviet Union.

The people who cut their teeth in the 1990s came of age in that period. They grow up in the period of American unipolarity, where the United States can do everything, thinks it can do everything, is trying to do everything, not if it costs much, but is very ambitious.

And I think that sense of hubris has continued to operate in the minds of people who have now risen to positions of authority. I'm thinking of the Jake Sullivans of the world and the Tony Blinkens of the world as well, that they don't have quite the same sobriety, if you will, that older generations might've had.

And we're now going to see if we get a different elite emerging with a very different worldview. I would like to think that a different elite would do better, but there are no guarantees in this life.

HANNAH: The end of the Cold War marked a beginning of America’s unipolar moment. It was even hailed by some as the end of history. But as we will discover throughout this series, that was far from the case. Turbulence in post-Soviet Russia under Boris Yeltsin was setting the stage for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. We’ll talk about that next time on “None Of The Above.”

For this time, I want to thank Deborah Amos, Thomas Pickering, and Stephen Walt for joining me. Special thanks also of course go out to our None Of The Above team: Eloise Cassier, Sarah Leeson, Lucas Robinson, and Ransom Miller. Our intern, Julianna Lozada, also helped with this episode.

If you enjoyed what you’ve heard, consider subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us if you feel so inclined, and send us your comments or your questions at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. I’m Mark Hannah. Thanks for tuning in.

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