Foreign policy of the United
States
Definition The interactions of the United States
government and its representatives with other
countries of the world
Greatly reduced tensions between the United States and the
Soviet Union, the primar y U.S. rival since the 1940’s, cre-
ated new opportunities for a decade of U.S. leadership in
global affairs. By acting in many instances in concert with
other states, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton
presided over an era of unprecedented power and extended
influence during the 1990’s.
In the months leading to January, 1990, more
changes in the global distribution of power oc-
curred than in the preceding forty years. Virtually
the entire alliance system of states loyal to the Soviet
Union collapsed during 1989, as elections in Poland
and popular revolutions in East Germany, Czecho-
slovakia, and Romania brought new noncommunist
governments to power. This process continued in
the early months of 1990, when further leadership
changes swept new governments to power in both
Bulgaria and Hungary. All of these new govern-
ments looked to the United States and its allies for
external support over the next decade. By the end of
the 1990’s, every one of these former Soviet allies
had initiated a process that aimed at joining the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Po-
land, Hungary, and the Czech Republic formally
were admitted in 1998 as full members under the se-
curity umbrella of NATO’s armed forces. Of greatest
symbolic significance was the unification of formerly
communist East Germany as an integral part of the
Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), a
U.S. ally, on October 3, 1990.
These changes marked a power shift of historic
proportions, one that the Soviet communist leader,
President Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991), substan-
tially accommodated by refusing to intervene mili-
tarily to save the communist system, either in East-
Central Europe or within his own country when
communism collapsed there in 1991. The shift to-
ward cooperation between the two superpowers also
was evident in Gorbachev’s response to U.S. initia-
tives at the United Nations. Prior to 1988, the Soviets
had opposed nearly everything the United States
had favored at the United Nations, but in the 1990’s
that would change, especially regarding Iraq.
Led by onetime Soviet-ally Saddam Hussein, Iraq
attempted on August 2, 1990, to gain greater control
over global petroleum resources through the use of
military force against neighboring, oil-rich Kuwait.
At the U.N. Security Council in 1990, the Soviet
Union chose to join with the United States and the
rest of the global community in a series of harsh reso-
lutions demanding Iraq desist and withdraw. Ulti-
mately, though no Soviet troops participated, it was
on the basis of authority from the world community
(U.N. Resolution 678) that the United States led a
successful military operation, Desert Storm, to expel
Iraq from Kuwait in the Gulf War. Where presidents
before George H. W. Bush (1989-1993) often had
been unable to secure congressional authorization
to use military force to protect U.S. interests abroad,
President Bush’s decision to employ military force
against Iraq legally was authorized by Congress on
January 12, 1991: 52-47 in the Senate and 250-183 in
the House of Representatives. Acting in conjunction
with Great Britain, France, and limited numbers of
forces from some twenty-eight other nations, U.S.
armed forces clearly demonstrated that they were
the world’s most capable. Throughout the rest of the
decade, the U.S. Air Force patrolled the skies over
Iraq to reinforce peace terms that compelled Iraq to
disarm, and as doubts about Iraq’s disarmament fes-
tered, air raids were frequent, especially in Decem-
ber, 1998.Trying to Lead the Global Community In mobiliz-
ing public support in 1990-1991, President Bush had
spoken of a “new world order,” invoking deeply felt
hopes for a future world in which global institutions
would replace the law of the jungle among nations.
On the basis of such sweeping aspirations, Bush re-
luctantly deployed soldiers in a U.N. project to stop
famine amid a civil war in the East African country of
Somalia. Without a clear tie to U.S. interests, Ameri-
can military leaders were reluctant to commit sub-
stantial resources to a seemingly endless Somalia
project, and in the face of a small but rising number
of U.S. casualties in 1993-1994, Bush’s successor,
President Bill Clinton (1993-2001), withdrew from
the region.
Both Bush and Clinton also displayed reluctance
to involve military forces when interethnic tensions
in southeastern Europe fractured the former Yugo-
slavia. The United States long had advocated demo-
cratic change in all parts of the communist world,346 Foreign policy of the United States The Nineties in America