![]() The U.S.-led coalition’s war against President Saddam Hussein was a shockingly successful exercise. For a while, a new era of great-power competition beckoned.īy the mid-1990s, though, Americans had chilled out. Both Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy wrote thrillers in which the United States was threatened with humiliation by the rising Asian economic power, Japan. Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, suggested that the future would feature civilizational bloodbaths. In 1990, John Mearsheimer mused in The Atlantic that Americans would soon miss the Cold War as the world collapsed into anarchy. ![]() That optimism reflected a hard turn from the anxieties those same classes had embraced in the unsettled, immediate post-Cold War world. The book formed part of the glut of glib globalization cheerleading that defined the true unipolar moment-that period between the mid-1990s and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. If that sounds like the theory of the capitalist peace as understood by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Richard Cobden, well, it pretty much was. Our textbook was The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a 1999 bestseller by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.įriedman’s claim was simple: The benefits of economic integration reduce the policy choices open to governments, making war-which disrupts that integration-so unattractive as to be practically unthinkable. Back when Bill Clinton was still president, President Donald Trump a punchline, and the Twin Towers standing, I was a college freshman taking a course on American foreign policy. It’s another blow to the idea that economic globalization by itself can make war less likely-and instead, how the legacies left behind by imperial decline will give birth to a new wave of conflict. A company once held up as a disincentive to war had become a participant in one. That included the local branch of McDonald’s, which posted some ardently (and brief-lived) pro-Azeri sentiments on Twitter.įor Americans who remember the lazily optimistic foreign-policy analysis their country produced in the 1990s, it was a poignant moment. ![]() As tanks exploded and refugees fled in the latest round of Armenia and Azerbaijan’s war over Nagorno-Karabakh, social media became another battlefield-with some surprising participants. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |